Catching up with Liam Wright: A Lesson in Leading from the Sidelines

Liam Wright needs no introduction to Reds fans. An active member of the squad since 2018, Brad Thorne appointed him team captain at the beginning of 2020. He led the team through the most difficult year of rugby ever as the team became runners up in the first ever "Super Rugby AU" competition.

As Super Rugby 2021 kicked off, Wright suffered an ankle injury during the Reds one and only pre-season match, which unfortunately has put him on the sidelines for a while. But this hasn't stopped him give whatever he can to the team and "leading from the sidelines", alongside stand-in skipper, my good mate, James O'Connor.

As Reds fans also know, the team has a lot of depth in their squad. As Super Rugby officially kicked off last weekend, the Reds defeated their old foe the Waratahs, 41-7.

I spoke with Liam about how he's travelling and what life is like for an "assistant assistant" coach (as Thorny calls him) and how his rehab is going.

Here's to a great 2021 for our Queensland Reds!

Hey Liam, great to see you! Thanks for making the time to catch up. Are you tired of Zoom yet?

(Laughs.) Yeah thanks Tommy, thanks for having me back again. Um… bits and pieces of it. It’s an easy to do things, especially at the moment… as you can see (moves camera) I’ve got my ankle just “ice-ing” up at the moment. But yeah, kind of missing all the face-to-face stuff.

Me too. How is the ankle?

Ah yeah the ankle’s going pretty good actually. We’re in week 3 at the moment… The first week and a half was very slow, I couldn’t do much except sit around and wait for it to swell and go down. I couldn’t do much gym or mobilisation or anything like that. The key was just to keep the swelling down, so that it didn’t inhibit our rehab further down track. We’re getting to the point now where we can push a lot more. We’ve had sessions in the pool where I can take the moon boot off which is really really nice. But yeah hopefully in a few weeks I’ll be out of that and away from the crutches.

We were all gutted about your injury. But at least, on the bright side, you’ve got a bit more time to chat!

(Laughs.) Yeah, exactly! I've had to spend the first couple of weeks finding ways to look at the bright side. I'm very happy to be here and talking to you and keep finding things to take out of it that are positive.

What does an average day look like for you, during injury recovery?

One of Liam's many hair styles he's sported while with the Reds

Yeah sure. The first couple of weeks were really annoying, because I wanted to be around the team and doing as much as I could, but it was really important from the physio's point of view to be off my feet as much as possible with my leg elevated. But now, I've been lucky enough that on a typical day, I can do gym, so a lot of upper body stuff 4-5 times a week and then we have been introducing some lower body things as well. We'll have treatment for about 30-40 minutes, making sure things don't tighten up and doing things on the ankle and then a lot of the other time is spent with the team, with the boys, which is really good. That's the thing I miss. A lot of the time I can't do a lot, I'm sitting on the sideline watching... but I'm trying to do a bit behind the scenes, with regards to our line out, and a bit of coaching and stuff. Thorny's calling me the "assistant assistant". So I'm finding ways to fit in and it's really good that I'm still able to be around the team. I'm trying to help out where I can and take a few things off Jame's shoulders.

I checked our last interview from July (last year) and the last time we spoke was right after we won the Bob Templeton Cup [the annual awards for the Queensland/New South Wales derby].

(Laughs) Pretty fitting then isn’t it! We just won it again and probably in better style, some would say. It’s a pretty good way to start out the year.

It’s very nerve racking watching on the sideline. I’m not a good spectator - knowing that I can’t do much about it.

Congrats to you and the whole team on a great start to the season. It was fun to watch!

Thank you.

What’s the number one thing that the team is focusing on at the moment?

I think, it’s probably not getting ahead of ourselves. We look back on that game, and it’s a good win, we’ll take that and it’s good being against the Tahs, but during that middle 30 minutes where we switched off... we had a one man advantage and we didn’t end up scoring any points on them. That was pretty disappointing. I think looking back on it we know we probably should have put another 20 points on. It’s probably a good reality check for us, saying "let’s not get ahead of ourselves". The Rebels are going to be very tough, different as well, and really it’s just about focusing on our own game, otherwise we fall Into the complacency trap.

Congratulations on being selected for the Wallabies last year!

Thank you.

What did you love most about the experience?

What did I enjoy… It was a pretty fresh group of guys coming in after the World Cup, new group of coaches as well, so it was a really fresh approach to everything. The thing I got out of it the most was… overall we had to take a step back and reconsider how you look at our individual game - how you approach it and how you can work on it. The new coaches saw different strengths and weaknesses and it was good to take a step back rather than look at the overall team thing. It was good to look at individual skills that I can add to my game that will make me a better player, things that you can sometimes gloss over and forget about during the regular season. I found that really interesting and really enjoyable.

I was at Suncorp when we beat the All Blacks. That was a good night!

That was a very good night. That was awesome. It was a bit of a crazy game, two red cards… but that I think it was good. Probably that red card to us helped validated it a bit. It would have been easy for people to write it off as saying “they only beat them because they had a man down” or something. I think in a way it was good for us to know that we can beat them. We probably let a few of our other games slip. But yeah it was good to get that last one at Suncorp, especially for Slip on his 100th match [James Slipper]. An old Reds man.

One of Liam's (debatably) more popular hair styles

Once a Red always a Red.

Yeah thats it. Exactly right.

Suncorp’s definitely become a fortress, for the Reds and the Wallabies. I love it!

Yeah we love it aswell. It’s something we’ve been trying to do, make it our fortress. And our fans like you Tommy are a big part of that and the reason we enjoy it.

Thanks heaps for taking time to catch up again Liam. I’m “cheering you on”, hoping you recover soon.

My pleasure. Any time.

Please say hi to everybody in the team for me. And all the best against the Rebels this Friday!

Thanks very much! Go the Reds!