Taken from me old mates at Rugby Heaven...


http://www.rugbyheaven.smh.com.au/ar...648205289.html


He's been to hell and back - now Australia's best fullback is getting set to unleash his attacking fury at the World Cup next month, Andrew Webster writes.

CHRIS Latham sticks his finger inside his mouth and goes ... pop! "That's the sound it made," he says.

It's like the pop of a cork coming off a Bollinger bottle at the races. The pop from the opening credits of Seinfeld.

And - as many footballers know - it's the same sound an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) makes when it explodes in a knee, cruelling seasons and careers, savaging dreams, sending players straight through the gates of hell.

Latham heard that dreadful noise come from his right leg on January 6 during an innocuous training mishap at Ballymore in the preseason for the Queensland Reds.

During a game of touch, for chrissakes. A player fellover him. Another fell over him ... pop!


"But it wasn't painful, which surprised me," Latham says. "Then I got up and felt something was wrong. I remembered our physio had done an ACL as well. I hobbled over and asked, 'Is this the sound that you heard when you did yours?'

"And he said, 'Yeah. Why?'

"I was devastated. My whole world had crashed around me and everything I'd ever worked for had been for nothing. It was going to take nine months - not enough time to reach the World Cup. I was resigned there and then that I couldn't make it."

Fast forward to during the week and Latham sits relaxed in the foyer of the Wallabies team hotel in Manly at the end of a three-day camp.

Asked now how his knee feels, six weeks from the side's opening match of the tournament in France, and he responds: "It's perfect."

Latham, who has played 73 Tests for the Wallabies, has rebuilt his knee and is convinced he has almost rebuilt his confidence after playing 23 minutes against the All Blacks at Eden Park last month.

He'll play another two matches for Gold Coast in the Australian Rugby Championship before, you would expect, finally regaining the No. 15 jersey from Julian Huxley for the cup opener against Japan on his 32nd birthday - September 8.

It's a remarkable turnaround for a player who was considered the world's best fullback before that fateful Ballymore incident.

Actually, scratch that last sentence. "Remarkable turnaround" does not do justice to Latham's comeback.

So start with Peter Myers, the renowned Brisbane orthopedic surgeon who has operated on the knees of Broncos Darren Lockyer and Brent Tate.

"I had a very good surgeon, which I found out means everything," Latham says.

Move on to Cameron Lillicrap, the former Test prop and national team's physio who told Latham what to do.

"He worked wonders," Latham says.

And Dirk Spitz, the man he's been with every day in rehab, the ARU talent squad's strength and conditioning coach.

"The bloke with the very good porno name," Latham jokes.

He can laugh but the six months beyond hell's gates have been tough.

"I've taken years off Dirk's life," he says. "Physically, it's hard enough but I think dealing with the mental part of it is probably the hardest. I've driven my wife Michelle to the point of insanity. I've pretty much taken Dirk there.

"There are days where you come off and you've done so well and you're on a high because you can see improvements and positive changes and you think, 'How good is this?'

"Then all of a sudden you wake up the next day and all that's turned around. You can't achieve what you did the week before. It's all negative: I'm not going to make it. I'm not going to ever play again. I might as well give up now."

Thankfully, Latham did not.

After getting through two club matches for Gold Coast, he was spirited into the Wallabies team for that Bledisloe Cup match. Wallabies legend Tim Horan reckoned it was insanity. A hiding to nothing.

Latham's first kick back on the international scene - a towering 60 metre torpedo punt - gave him an instant shot of confidence.

"But it was the first high ball I caught," he says, "when I instinctively stepped Joe Rokocoko, that I felt like I was back. I got taken over the sideline but it proved to me that I could still react. I wasn't worried that I'd been dragged over the sideline.

"To be able, without thinking, to step off the left and drive off the right and get out of there.

"It made me think, 'I'm right now'."

Latham's recovery is one of the genuine positives the Wallabies will take to France. And given the headlines that have greeted the side over breakfast in Manly, you'd suggest they need those happy vignettes.

But the veteran fullback says revelations in The Sydney Morning Herald that there are deep schisms in John Connolly's coaching staff has not hurt the side.

"That's the coaching staff - it's for them to work out," he says. "To be honest, it gives the team something to joke about it. It gives us boys an opportunity to take a cheap shot at them. After being out this year, the transformation of the side since coming into it is amazing. The vibe within the team, on the training field ... I've never felt anything like it."

Besides, Latham approaches this cup with his own point to prove.

In 1999, he was Matt Burke's back-up. In 2003, he was understudy to Mat Rogers. This will be his last World Cup but don't mention retirement to a man who's yet to sign with the ARU beyond this season.

"Everyone wants to put a label on when you are too old," he says. "There's always a cut-off date. I'd like to know who invented that date.

" I'm just trying to get through what's been a difficult and hectic time ... and just to be here means the world to me."