IT is the sports news that has made every man in the country cross his legs in sympathetic agony, but even a ruptured testicle is all in a day’s work for Paul Wood and his rugby league colleagues.

The media attention he has received after it emerged he played for 19 minutes of the Grand Final defeat with a ruptured testicle has shone a spotlight on the physical pressures that Super League players compete under week in, week out, and Wood believes that can only be good for the sport.

“A lot of people are looking at rugby league right now and recognising that we go through the mill,” he said.

“If you go in the changing rooms before a game and you saw the amount of injuries you play through, with the injections, painkillers etc, you would know that this is the norm.

“Granted it is an extreme case, losing a testicle, but there are still a lot of people who have to play with terrible injuries every week.”

Astonishingly in those 19 minutes Wood made 14 tackles and four carries, after a stray knee from Leeds centre Kallum Watkins caught him in the groin.

But far from worrying about himself, Wood was more concerned about letting down his teammates than heading off for treatment, a decision that has made the story all the more astonishing for those people unaccustomed with the superhuman sacrifices rugby league players make every week.

“I won’t deny that I was in a lot of pain when it happened but when you are playing in a Grand Final that you have been working towards for 10 months, anyone would do the same,” he said.

“The physio came on and asked me to come off, but I just asked him to leave me and let me do my time.

“I think a lot of it is that I don’t like letting people down and if I would have come off and reduced us to 16 players in a Grand Final I would have been so annoyed.

“I like to look at myself in the mirror after every game and say ‘I have worked my balls off for my team’ and this week I have done that.”