Hill's career in the balance (From The Wiltshire Gazette and Herald)

Hill's career in the balance

SALISBURY'S England Rugby star Richard Hill's career faces an anxious wait to find out whether the injury, which has ruled him out of the remainder of the British Lions' tour of New Zealand, will prove career-threatening. The Saracens forward, who began his playing career with Salisbury Rugby Club, limped off the field just 17 minutes into the Lions' humiliating 21-3 defeat at the the hands of the All Blacks in Christchurch. The 32-year-old former Bishop Wordsworth's School pupil fell awkwardly while making one of his trademark crunching tackles. He was helped off the field and stretchered into the dressing room. Tour doctors immediately ruled the influential flanker out of the rest of the tour pending further medical investigations. Early scans are said by Lions' boss Clive Woodward to be "suggestive of damage" to the World Cup winner's anterior cruciate ligament - an identical knee injury to that which forced him to sit out much of last season. Hill has already undergone reconstructive surgery on the knee, missing out on England's latest Six Nations campaign as a result. A repeat of the same injury so soon after his return to fitness would, at the very least, require a further lengthy period of recuperation. Hill's premature departure from the Lions compounds a catalogue of injury woes, including the dislocated shoulder sustained by skipper Brian O'Dris-coll during the same match, described by Woodward as "a bad day in many, many ways." He added that, should Hill's injury prove to be a rupture of his cruciate ligament, it would indeed be "very serious - a career-threatening injury."