Leinster's RG Snyman has been ruled out for the remainder of the season after the province confirmed the second row has ruptured the ACL in his right knee.
The South African double World Cup winner suffered the injury after a crunching tackle by Glasgow Warriors lock Alex Samuel, in Leinster's 38-17 defeat at Scotstoun earlier this month.
It is the third time Snyman has suffered an ACL injury in his career, with the 31-year-old now set for an extended period on the sidelines.
"He's obviously going to get it fixed soon, and then his rehab will begin," senior coach Jacques Nienaber said this afternoon.
"It's devastating for us and for him, if you think about the other couple when he was with Munster."
The Pretoria native, who joined Leinster in 2024, signed a one-year contract extension this time last year, although Nienaber was reluctant to give details on whether he would be staying in Dublin beyond this summer.
"In my head, I think he is. I assume he is," Nienaber replied, when asked if Snyman is under contract at Leinster for next season.
"But I think it's better you ask the guy who's responsible for the details. I don't know the details."
The towering second row endured the first of those serious injuries on his debut for Munster in August 2020, before re-injuring it three games into his comeback in October 2021, the second of which took 17 months to come back from. Both previous ACL tears were on his left knee, with the latest injury on his right.
While he made just 20 appearances in four seasons at Munster, Snyman had stayed relatively injury-free since moving to Leinster in the summer of 2024, with 31 appearances for the province across the last season and a half.
And Nienaber, who has worked with Snyman since his teens, believes he will return just as strong as ever.
"He's shown that over and over, since I've been coaching him, when he was a schoolboy at 18. So he had a long start of his career where he had zero injuries.
"I can't remember that he ever had injuries up to from when I coached him. I don't know what year that would have been, when he was 18 years old. And then I started coaching him in 2018 with the Boks.
"He had a fairly good run, and then I think he picked up his first major injury when he was with Munster in 2020, and then with the Boks and with us at Leinster, we got good value out of him over the last couple of seasons," he added.
The province are carrying a number of knocks into this weekend's Investec Champions Cup Round of 16 tie with Edinburgh at Aviva Stadium.
Second row James Ryan continues to be an injury doubt as he deals with the calf injury which has sidelined him since Round 4 of the Six Nations, while Garry Ringrose, Tadhg Furlong and Jimmy O'Brien will also be assessed for unspecified injuries, according to Leinster's latest medical bulletin.
