Steele: I’d had enough of playing in pain

Even as he lay down for an MRI scan at Spire Murrayfield hospital last October, Scott Steele knew it was over.
Having broken down with hip trouble for what felt like the 100th time in the days after his one and only Edinburgh appearance — a pre-season friendly against Connacht — the former Scotland scrum half had reached a certain acceptance.
A third major surgery on the joint — the same resurfacing procedure that prolonged Andy Murray’s tennis career — would have given Steele another crack, but he had grown sick of a cycle where he’d be able to manage the pain for two or three games before inevitably succumbing again. Barely three months into his 30s, he was also well aware that the next step in the event of the resurfacing not working would be a full hip replacement.
“They asked what music I wanted on during the scan — they had things like Abba and Queen,” Steele recalled. “I went for Queen and the first song that comes on is Another One Bites the Dust. I was just pissing myself: if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. It wasn’t like what they were going to tell me would be a surprise — I’d been dealing with those issues for years.
“I kick with my left leg so that was another complication. I’d have coaches saying, ‘you need to work on your kicking’, and I just knew that every practice was going to make it worse.
“It’s quite refreshing not to be having to play those sort of games and be trying to manage stuff. Back then I’d know my hip was knackered, but you’d have someone saying, ‘well you’re not getting a contract next year’, and I’d be like, ‘oh no, it’s fine’. Then I’d not play the level that I wanted to and the whole cycle repeated. It’s been quite refreshing not to have to constantly juggle that any more.
“I know guys who have had the resurfacing and come back playing professionally — Sean O’Brien when I was at London Irish and now Ollie Devoto [the former Exeter and England centre]. But I knew that if I did that, I’d still be worrying about it all the time. I wouldn’t be playing or training full-out because I was worried about getting injured again.
“Mentally, I think I had just run my course with it. I also had back issues because of it. When you’re playing professionally, it’s your livelihood so you’ve never really got the option to err on the side of caution: I was never in a position to be cemented first choice, so there’s always someone looking over your shoulder to get your spot. You never have the luxury of taking a few weeks out to get it right.”
Steele had had issues with his hip since his early 20s, when he moved from his native Dumfries to professional contracts first with Leicester Tigers then Irish.
“Genetically my hips aren’t the right shape — the ball isn’t a perfect sphere so when it moves round it catches bone on bone,” he explained. “I had two operations, at 21 and 27 to shave it all down, and that’s a short-term fix. Because of the amount of kicking I’d do, it would just build back up, and then the last time they were in, the other cartilage was gone — it was bone on bone.
“I’d manage to get through training — sometimes it would lock up when I was kicking — but then afterwards it would just be a damn pain. It wasn’t until I had this operation that I realised how much pain I was actually in. Your body just sort of gets used to it.”
Steele resolved to formally retire at the end of the season, and used the last six months of his time in the professional ranks to build up to then rehab from the resurfacing, which took place in February. His hip now feels as good as it has in a long time, and that spectre of a full replacement has receded.
“Now I’ve not got that joint pain, because it’s just metal on metal, so there’s nothing in there to cause inflammation. It’s still tight around the hip in general, but to get that constant pain away has been great.
“Because it [the resurfacing procedure] is relatively modern, they don’t really know how long the metal in there will last — the estimate is 20 years. That’s something that I’ll have to worry about further down the line, but that [a replacement] would be the next step if the metal was to wear away.
“It’s not really something you expect to be thinking about when you’re 30 years old, is it, but I was 21 when I had my first operation, and they told me I’d almost certainly need a replacement before I got to 40.”
Steele is not necessarily finished with the game. The new spring in his step has led him to explore the possibility of a partial return in the domestic Premiership. He has been training with his local club, Heriot’s, but is close to accepting an approach from Adam Ashe, a former Scotland under-20 team-mate, to sign for the Glasgow Hawks side he now coaches as an assistant to Andy Hill.
“It will be a case of seeing how my body goes,” Steele said. “Even doing the Tuesdays and Thursdays is a lot easier than doing the professional Monday and Tuesday — those back to back days was something I really struggled with, but my new metal hip feels great in comparison.
“If I do end up playing for a club team, it would be on the agreement that I’m not going to be playing every single game and if there are issues, I’m not going to be like, ‘right, I’ll just get through it’.”
While he wasn’t able to give Edinburgh what he had planned to when moving north last summer, Steele still formed a clear impression of the club’s potential and some of the impediments to it being fulfilled.
“It was strange for me coming up here to see how connected the Edinburgh team was to the Scotland set-up. Certain players that maybe weren’t playing particularly well for Edinburgh were still in the Scotland set-up. I know it’s because there are only two teams, but for me it was less a club feel, more, ‘what can Edinburgh do to facilitate the Scotland team’, which I completely get from a Scotland point of view.
“But in terms of a club identity, a club feel about it… I compare it to Quins and Irish, who say, ‘this is the way we do it, we’re going to recruit in that way, we’re going to get players in to suit our style’. It’s a bit of an ‘us against the world’ mentality, we can structure it whatever way we want without eyes from above looking down.
“In terms of style, even talking as a fan last year, it wasn’t particularly exciting. We’ve got exciting players, there’s no doubt about that, and we did score some exciting tries off of turnover and stuff but we didn’t really create that much.
“Especially with that back three, you’ve got to find a way of scaring them in the game. The coaches know that, they’ve brought in some new signings and a new attack coach, so hopefully that will help and they’ll be able to play a bit more of an attacking blend, while also using the stuff that Sean [Everitt, the head coach] brought in terms of game management.”
The best time of Steele’s career came between October 2020 and June 2021. Having been freed by Irish at the outset of the pandemic, he went from not having a job to being a Premiership champion with Quins and a fully fledged international. His first cap came in Scotland’s first win on Welsh soil in 18 years, and his second in their first Twickenham success since 1983. Injuries had Steele coming off the bench on the wing in Llanelli, and then into the back row for his third cap against Ireland. He was an unused replacement for Scotland’s first win over France in Paris since 1999.
“That spell was a recurring series of ‘pinch-yourself’ moments,” he acknowledged. “I was constantly asking myself, ‘how have I ended up here?’ but my approach was always just to try to make the very most of each opportunity.”
Steele had started out in a role helping other ex-athletes transition into the world of technology sales, but quickly worked out it was not for him. He is taking some time to decide on his next steps, grateful for the fact that he can now take them without being in a world of discomfort.