Joe Cokanasiga: ‘Staying angry for a long time doesn’t help anything’

At last there are a few rays of sunshine to help raise Joe Cokanasiga’s spirits. No one in English rugby has been on a more intense emotional road these past three years but finally light is visible at the end of a dispiritingly dark tunnel. “Everything happens for a reason,” murmurs the big man softly. “I’m a big believer in that. My time will come.”

Sitting outside on the steps of Bath’s country mansion training ground, with the daffodils flowering behind him and spring firmly in the air, his optimistic smile is also a much-needed antidote to the massive challenges the Cokanasiga family have had to confront, many shamefully inflicted on them by the British government.

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Imagine being Cokanasiga’s father, Ilaitia, who served almost 14 years in the British army, including two tours of Iraq and one in Afghanistan, only to be denied re-entry to the UK after being told he no longer had a legal right to remain. Now imagine being his mother Kitty, in tears on the phone to her stranded husband as she fought to overcome a cancerous brain tumour. Or Big Joe himself, representing a country which suddenly decided to turn its back on his family and other servicemen in similar positions.

Then ladle on top the psychological effects of the two knee injuries which first restricted him at the 2019 Rugby World Cup and has latterly been driving him to distraction again. The damaged PCL [posterior cruciate ligament] he sustained in a pre-season friendly against Cardiff last September almost broke him. “That was probably the hardest part. I remember walking back from the shops after I got the call. It was devastating. I was with my girlfriend,