Tariq Sims reveals double groin surgery as gruesome as breaking the same leg, twice
After breaking the same leg, twice, St George Illawarra forward Tariq Sims knows pain. But even that wasn’t as bad as the surgery he needed for a double groin reconstruction.
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When Tariq Sims runs on to the field in round one next year he’ll be wearing two Red Vs — one proudly on his chest, the other underneath his St George Illawarra jersey.
The hidden V is a huge scar left by the scalpel used to cut him open from each hip down to his pubic bone.
The Dragons forward said he required a double groin reconstruction after playing until round 21 with a groin injury to each side of his body.
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“I had a double groin reconstruction with two hernia removals … there’s no nice way to put the surgery. They cut me from the hip bone down to my private parts on both sides and snip a few things up, reattach a few things and the hernia removals were pretty decent as well. You don’t want to see what it looked like right after the surgery,” he said.
Sims revealed he injured his groins during the Charity Shield against South Sydney in March. He did the left one in the first half and then the right one in the second half.
But selflessly, Sims decided to play with the injuries until the pain was too much to bear in August this year.
“I did it moving laterally just trying to tackle blokes … the grass on the field was a bit long,” he said.
“But we already had a lot of injuries at the start of the year, Gareth Widdop, Tyson Frizell, Corey Norman were all out during stages.
“We tried to monitor it as best we could throughout the year but it was getting a bit too much to play with toward the back end of the year. Once we were out of finals contention is when we decided to get surgery.”
Sims is no stranger to dealing with debilitating injury. After making his NRL debut for North Queensland in 2011, Sims broke the same tibia and fibula twice the following year.
“This groin surgery was right up with those injuries. I couldn’t move at all for the first week. Then it was a slow process of trying to stand up, getting in and out of bed, sitting down then getting back up again … it was all hard,” he said.
“Talking, coughing, sneezing even going to the toilet for the first six weeks were pretty tough. You don’t realise how important the lower abdominal muscles are.”
Despite the gruelling recovery Sims been back in pre-season training since November.
He revealed coach Paul McGregor wants to take a mobile forward pack into season 2020. It means Sims has been training in the side’s ‘fat club’ to help him drop at least two kilograms off his current playing weight of 105 kilograms.
“Things are different this pre-season to the past. It’s a lot more physical a lot earlier, a lot more running. Some changes have been made and we are implementing some new things. There’s pressure on each other to do better. We’ve set hard targets this year personally,” he said.
“We want to be more of a mobile pack, so I’m losing a few kilos so we can be a bit more mobile throughout the middle. That’s the evolution of the game, you look at the teams that are successful, they’re the ones who adapt to the changes the quickest.”
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The backrow enforcer also threw his support behind embattled coach McGregor after the Dragons managed only eight wins in 2019 to finish a low 15th of the NRL ladder.
“He’s the kind of coach who will come out and wear that bullet first, he wants to protect us his football family. He’s like a father to us. He’s had to wear a lot of the criticism recently and it comes thick and fast especially towards him,” Sims said.
“But it falls back on us, he comes up with game plan but we are the ones that need to execute it and we didn’t do it well enough this year.”