‘Mistakes? I’ve made a few’

He’s had what Munster veterans like to call the odd ‘brain fart’, but Conor Murray has gone from a wet-behind-the-ears wannabe to Lions scrum-half in no time.

And he’s more convinced than ever that Anthony Foley’s new regime in the province is working. “We’re very up to date with how rugby is being played around the world,” he says.

‘Next!’

In many ways Conor Murray’s season is a lot about that word, though for him it probably echoes most clearly in the sharp voice of Joe Schmidt.

Next for Murray is Leinster this evening, in the Aviva, yet as much as he’s been in the Munster bubble this past while, it’s only a matter of days since he was rubbing shoulders with the guys in blue.

That’s because they were all in green. Last Sunday week around lunchtime they all met up in Carton House for a quick 30-hour camp with an eye to the autumn internationals and another to the World Cup.

Everything is slowly building to England 2015. There’s plenty of micro-cycles within the year to make sure you don’t get too far ahead of yourself and to keep yourself locked in on the here and now – these series of games in what you were getting used to calling the Rabo but now they want you to call the Guinness Pro12, then what we knew as the Heineken but is now the European Champions Rugby Cup, then those autumn internationals, then back to the provinces, then... – but a bit like being out on that field playing scrum-half, you have to keep the head up and scan what’s happening out in front of you as well. So Schmidt brought them in, just like he did for an overnight camp in August. Planting seeds. Demanding standards.

“I wouldn’t say fear is what governs you playing for Joe but you’re very mindful that you need to know your stuff before you ever go on the pitch,” says Murray. “We were down to have a walk through in the sports centre in Leixlip at 3pm about how we’re going to play against South Africa and from the moment we met up in Carton a few hours earlier, all eight laptops were occupied. There was literally a scramble to get onto them so fellas could refresh themselves on our plays and what we’d worked on in the last camp.”

How do you incur Schmidt’s wrath? How does he censure you? Simple. You don’t play. You don’t even get to train. You’re pulled there and then.

“We went down to Leixlip and if someone was in a ruck when they shouldn’t have been, there was no tap on the shoulder, ‘Em, should you have been there?’ It’s ‘Out! Next team in! NEXT!’

“It puts pressure on you not to let your team down. It’s such a team game and if you get your role wrong when the other 14 lads have all studied it and nailed it, he lets you know it’s your fault that it’s broken down and that you’ve let them down, that you’re not giving them or yourself the best chance to win. Joe’s brought a lot more than that but it’s certainly one of his big things which we’ve all bought into.”

Mistakes are inevitable in a game like rugby. Murray knows that and Schmidt accepts that.

When you do make a skills mistake Schmidt will often pose to him, “Have you been practising that much?” He often quotes Aristotle to them. “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit.” With Murray, Schmidt knows the answer is invariably in the affirmative; Murray’s dedication to skills and practice is as impressive as anyone on the squad.

But sometimes he makes other mistakes, of the more unforgiving kind, even if he invariably responds well to them.

The biggest was two years ago this month. Stupid. Criminal! Munster away to Racing Metro in the opening game of their European campaign. With eight minutes to go Simon Zebo breaks through for a try to put Munster ahead and in a great position to claim an invaluable away win.

With five minutes to go Metro pump the ball into the Munster 22. Murray tries to trap it with his foot. He fails to do so but it’s nothing to worry about it. Then he casually goes to retrieve it. Over to Stuart Barnes in the Sky commentary...

‘Oh, that is terrible from Conor Murray! He throws a dummy without any conviction, a sidestep without any speed... Where’s he going? There’s no support, he’s the last man there and once again Racing have thrown men into the breakdown and won themselves a penalty! He’s just handed the game back to Racing and the left boot of Olly Barkley.’ Barkley would score, Metro would win and Munster would lose because Murray had lost it.

How did he get through it? Ronan O’Gara helped. As the veteran number 10 returned to the dressing room and took up his seat alongside the bowed head of the 23-year-old scrum-half he could only quip with a sigh and a smile, “That was some brain fart, kid!” Nearly having a laugh about it relieved some of the angst.

Murray though was still lost in his own thoughts and anguish when everyone else had vacated the big jacuzzi in that dressing room. Then while he was on his own Rob Penney came in. “Rob was fantastic. He’s a really positive guy and he said that shit happens to everyone, no matter how good or bad a player is, the thing is to learn and move on from it.”

So Murray did. Almost right there and then. He deliberately left his adidas boots in that dressing room, as if by doing so he was leaving that game and that mistake right there, in the Stade de France. ‘NEXT!’ In Munster’s next Heineken Cup game he was man of the match in a 33-0 win over Edinburgh. “I don’t think I’ve ever been more focused for a game,” he says. In their last pool game they would beat Metro through an opening try from Murray, enough to win a quarter-final slot and deny Leinster one. After the brain fart he’d survived and thrived.

“Looking back, that was great for me, as a player and a person. I didn’t let it break me. I took a lot of confidence from it. I’ve seen people make mistakes and it cripples them and suffocates them. I just focused on trying to play well, not trying to make up for it because if you try to make up for it you can try too hard, you’re not playing in the moment.

“You see a lot of players retire and you realise you’re only going to do this for so often. When I was playing with the Ireland U20s I took it so seriously, too seriously. I had a bad game against France and I just made a promise to myself that whatever happens enjoy it. You spent so much time kicking a ball against the wall as a young fella that now that you’re doing it as a job, enjoy it.”

For all his humility —he pours the milk for my tea as well as his own — and conscientiousness, there’s a certain sangfroid, unflappability about Murray. Growing up he liked rugby but merely liked it. He liked a lot of sports, just like his parents. His mother’s father, Con Roache, played for Garryowen and for Munster against the Australians in 1948 but Barbara herself was a squash international. His father Gerry is a cycling enthusiast who only a few weeks ago could be spotted on television waving the Munster flag on a climb at the Tour of Spain. In his retirement Gerry also now plays a fair bit of golf.

As a kid Conor was very useful at soccer. Being from Patrickswell, he liked and playing hurling too, though he preferred Gaelic football. In primary school he also dabbled in basketball, coached by Irish international Michelle Aspell, which might explain his exceptional ball handling with the oval ball; even to this day while Munster are waiting around the UL Arena, he’ll join in with Simon Zebo in shooting a few hoops. But when he started growing the summer he was entering fifth year in school, rugby was the beneficiary. His school was St Munchin’s where the Munster Schools Cup was a big thing and the hype and the stage that went with it appealed to his competitive and flamboyant nature.

After that it’s been all one whirlwind and one massive progression. Munchin’s won the Schools Cup with Murray at out-half, his football skills shining. Next — he got called up to the Munster U20s, next the Ireland’s U20s. Next he helped Young Munster gain promotion to Division One, then next moved to Garryowen while joining the Munster Academy. Yet by the start of 2011 no one could have predicted he would finish the year playing in the World Cup.

He was only Munster’s fourth-choice scrum-half, well behind established internationals and Heineken Cup winners like Tomás O’Leary and Peter Stringer. He was playing for Garryowen in the Munster Senior Cup final. But when O’Leary and Stringer had been out injured or international duty he’d impressed in some cameos. And when Munster were knocked out of the Heineken Cup, Tony McGahan thought he was worth trying out and starting in the Amlin.

He impressed enough to stay in the team for the Celtic League final against Leinster, a game Munster would win and Brian O’Driscoll would contend he was the man of the match, and four months later enough to get a call-up from Declan Kidney onto the Irish World Cup panel; O’Leary and Stringer were left at home. He would come on and shine in the win over Australia, then start in the quarter-final against Wales. Two years later he was starring alongside the Welsh in beating Australia again with the Lions. Any break going he was taking.

“You need a certain amount of luck to get through. You just need someone to show faith in you and throw you in and then you either sink or swim. At the time I was just young, just trying to play and play well. I wasn’t thinking of taking out or over passing Strings or Tomás and trying to be number one.

“When you first come in you’re still quite tentative. I won’t say you just want to survive but you’re not as willing to go for things that might break the pattern. The Lions tour was definitely the turning point. Like, when I was watching Ben Youngs and Mike Phillips, I was playing for Garryowen and thinking they were a million miles from me. Then I’m training with them, watching them and comparing my passing to theirs, my kicking to theirs and I’m realising ‘I’m able for this.’ My running game especially came on that year. I understand the game now. I know when it’s a stupid time to try a dummy kick and when not.”

There’s always still something to learn. Last season Munster again came up short in a European semi-final and when Anthony Foley had his staff and players review that defeat to Toulon, Murray had to accept that on a couple of occasions he had box-kicked too quickly when chasers weren’t ready. Axel is a bit like Joe that way. His standards are high and demanding and his technical knowledge of the game exceptional.

“People who probably don’t know rugby might think we’ve gone back to the old Munster way that won Heineken Cups and old-school mauling, but that’s not the truth at all. We’re very up to date with how rugby is being played around the world. The breakdown is huge and we’re getting up to scratch on that, certainly in the way we train. I think the game he has in mind for us suits us more naturally than what we were playing under Rob. It’s a case now of going out and doing it.

“Axel and the rest of the staff are very aware of the standards needed to be a successful team. It can be something like wearing the wrong t-shirt at training; we have a big fining system in place that cuts down on that. Because as Joe says, excellence is what you repeatedly do. If you’re sloppy with your dress code, you can be casual about your diet. If your prep is sloppy isn’t there a chance then so will your performance? Axel, Fla [Jerry Flannery] and the lads just want us to win for ourselves. It’s all for ourselves.”

They’ve moved on from Emailgate, as Murray puts it. Quickly and lively, actually. How? The Munster way, says Murray. Through apologies, honesty and probably above all, humour.

“People might think it’s the official answer to give to anyone who asks you about that email but it was literally addressed within the day. Everyone in a rugby team knows that coaches talk among each other about whether they rate you or should keep you in the squad over the next few years and so on. It should have been dealt with between the player and the coach, but the fact it did get out there meant one or two players were quite upset about it, but it was resolved the next day. If Player X that was mentioned in the email had a good moment in training, we’d go over the top celebrating, ‘Oh, that was an unbelievable pass! Who said you couldn’t pass?!’ A bit like ROG that time of the brain fart.”

ROG has had some well-timed words with Murray. The night before last season’s Six Nations decider in Paris, O’Gara called to the Irish team hotel to take Murray, Paul O’Connell and Peter O’Mahony for a coffee. They talked about virtually everything but rugby only for O’Gara to tell his young former sidekick that he was better than anything that he’d be facing the next day. The previous year when another French team, Clermont, had got the better of them in the Heineken Cup semi-final, O’Gara trooped into the dressing room for the last time as a Munster European Cup player and again sat next to Murray. At the start of that campaign Murray had committed a brain fart. Now O’Gara with tears in their eyes was telling him at the end of it he was one of the leaders of the team. “It’s your team now. I have full faith in you and the lads.”

“It kind of hit me looking around the room with him,” says Murray. “‘Yeah, I’ve played in my share of big games now. It is for the likes of me to drive this on now’. It was definitely a lot of responsibility but the fact it came from ROG definitely gave me a lot of confidence.”

He sits on the leaders group now, along with the likes of O’Connell, Keith Earls, Damien Varley, Donncha O’Callaghan and Felix Jones. So far Foley has rotated the captaincy between them.

Murray wore the armband last week and while he mightn’t again in the coming weeks and months, he expects and is expected to lead. And soon, for Munster to start winning again. They had a good pre-season with its share of fun and hard work, working on that style of play and especially the breakdown. Now it’s time for it all to show on the pitch and with wins.

“It’s one of the things Axel says the whole time, ‘People don’t see you train, they see you for those 80 minutes, that’s what counts’. So you can rip into each other in training but at the end of the week people aren’t going to say ‘Ah, but they had a great session on Tuesday’. That’s why I don’t get overly-psyched up before a game. It’s about those 80 minutes. Games like this one against Leinster in the Aviva, that’s what it’s all about. It’s not a case of just getting through a game like this. You want to relish it. Enjoy it.”

Because it’s the next Next.