‘The answers are within the team’

Saturday, February 02, 2013

Donnacha Ryan is free of grudges and baggage and ready to tackle Wales again

A lot has happened to Donnacha Ryan in the 12 months since he was speared neck first into the ground by Bradley Davies.

The Wales lock should have been sent off rather than sin-binned by referee Wayne Barnes in that 2012 RBS 6 Nations opener at the Aviva Stadium, who knows what might have happened then. So influential are such decisions on the outcome of a championship decided over six short weeks that Ireland, rather than Wales, may have gone to complete a Grand Slam but Ryan, 29, bears no ill will towards Davies, he has more important issues to concern him.

A year ago, Ryan was still an Ireland benchwarmer, and fresh off it too, when Davies committed his act of foul play that would later earn him a seven-week ban from an independent judicial officer and exclude him from the subsequent Grand Slam celebrations enjoyed by Warren Gatland’s team.

This time around, Davies will be absent when Wales begin their title defence against Ireland in Cardiff, after an ankle injury in training forced him into surgery. Ryan, meanwhile, will go from substitute lock to Six Nations lineout leader at the Millennium Stadium, although when he touches down in the Welsh capital he insists there will be know excess baggage with him concerning past grudges.

Talking to the Irish Examiner at the Ireland training base in Carton House, the conversation turns to a Wales second row injury crisis that first struck down Alun Wyn Jones and Luke Charteris before enveloping Ryan’s “friend” Davies.

“My friend,” says Ryan, repeating the phrase with a smile. “I’ll have you know, I have sat in front of a judicial hearing and it’s not a pleasant experience. I’d put it on a par with, say, you’ve just scratched the principal’s car and smashed his window and you’re in his office and your mother’s on the way in.

“Look, I wouldn’t hold it against any person. Brent Cockbain broke my nose and I had a laugh with him after the game so if you’re going to start bringing that baggage with you you’d be carrying a very heavy bag, especially in rugby and in the forwards.

“I shook hands with Bradley afterwards and we had a pint and he’s a lovely guy. He’s probably kind of similar to myself, abrasive on the pitch and just get on with it.

“I wrote him a letter, a character reference for the hearing. Everyone wants to play rugby, nobody wants to go out and do damage to another player and it was nice that he rang me up afterwards and thanked me for it.

“No doubt we’ll play again and we’ll be kicking lumps out of one another but we’ll leave it there on the pitch and then we’ll meet up afterwards. It’s an unusual way to build a friendship but it is funny.”

Personal controversies apart, Ryan also holds no truck with the perception that Ireland have been dealt a series of unfair blows in their recent tussles with the Welsh. In 2011 it was Mike Phillips’ questionable try scored from what should have been an illegal lineout and aside from the Davies incident a year ago, there was Stephen Ferris’s disputed yellow card in the closing minutes in Dublin which led to a last-gasp penalty that consigned the Irish to a third straight defeat against Wales.

Stuff and nonsense, believes Ryan.

“People say we’ve been hard done by but if you go nitpicking at things like that you probably didn’t deserve to have won the game. As bad as that might sound, you want to be winning a game without relying on those small external factors.

“You’ve got to focus on what is in your control. It’s no good blaming the weather or the referee or the ground, they’re easy excuses. The answers are within the team, where we fell down and the processes that led to us falling down, or where did we do well. The positives are also important things to look for. It’s a professional sport and we’re results-based and it is tough and things do against you but it does build a lot of mental strength and you bring those experiences with you.”

Wales will have had more than their fair share of character-building reverses since landing the Grand Slam. Three narrow Test defeats in Australia over the summer bled into a disastrous autumn at home which saw consecutive losses to Argentina, Samoa, New Zealand and the Aussies again. It makes for contrasting mental states given Ireland’s final game of 2012 was a seven-try romp against Argentina.

“We’ve lost the last three games against them,” Ryan said by way of a reminder. “The last game (against Wales) we were winning, we went down to 14 men and ended up losing. It was a massive deflater. So now playing them over there will be another arduous task. They’ve had a bad run of things but if you look at the quality of opposition they’ve played, Australia four times and New Zealand as well, the November series is parked really.

“They might have been down with those results but it’s a fresh Six Nations and everybody’s buzzing for the biggest show going. For any player who wants to play at the top level this is where you want to be at so I’d imagine they’re going to be raising their game.

“From our point of view we’re the same and looking to take confidence from the good things that we did against Argentina. We learned a lot of lessons in New Zealand and from the minute we’ve been in camp this time, on the Sunday night straight after the European games, we were all switched on straight away. We realise the Welsh game is very important in terms of trying to have a good Six Nations, so obviously there’s a lot of focus on it.”

Ryan’s increased responsibility in the absence of fellow Munster lock Paul O’Connell began at national team level last November during the autumn series of Tests against South Africa and Argentina. The Tipperary man was one of the standout performers in both games, perhaps surprising given his delayed start to the campaign due to a hip injury. By his own admission, provincial form was not up to the same standard displayed at Test level and when Ryan did reach his customary high intensity in the season-saving Heineken Cup victory over Racing Metro a fortnight ago, it led Munster head coach Rob Penney to offer this post-match thought: “I thought Donnacha Ryan has been excellent when he has played for Ireland and good when he was playing for us. Today he has been excellent for us as well.”

“I think he’s dead right,” Ryan said of Penney’s comment. “I haven’t performed as well as I would have liked for Munster. He sat down with me (before the Racing game) and said straight out ‘you’re probably thinking too much, de-clutter your head of everything and just play’.

“It was so great, we went through the tape, and unfortunately I haven’t had as much one-to-one video analysis as I would have liked purely because of the time, but he’s very, very good. We went through the Edinburgh game and it was quite disappointing from a personal view. Things that I normally would have been really good at, I was sluggish at, and it was great the way he articulated it, too, like ‘you know you can do better, so let’s go and do it’.

“That was great, his wording is great and he’s not afraid to say a few harsh words now and again but at the end of it all you come away knowing exactly what your role is and that’s what you want from any coach, to be given proper direction.

“He was dead right. I would have liked to have performed a lot better. Obviously I was late into the season and there’s loads of excuses about injuries but I had a hip injury at the start (of pre-season) which curtailed a lot of the knowledge of the way we were trying to develop as a team and unfortunately I was probably thinking too much about that, tactically, and if you bring that into any game, especially rugby, you take away the aggressive element, and that’s not a good thing if you’re playing rugby.

“It was fantastic management on his part. There wasn’t any rocket science.”

No grudges, no baggage. A de-cluttered Donnacha Ryan can only be a good thing for Ireland when the Six Nations campaign gets under way in Cardiff tomorrow.

Soundbites: Ryan on.....

Playing alongside Mike McCarthy

“I’ve always loved playing with Mike. He’s a great player and I’ve played Ireland As with him coming up. You’re building relationships, familiarising yourself with a guy and what he does. I like hanging around with Mike, he’s a good bloke, very funny and done a very good job operating the lineout at Connacht, so it’s good to be able to hop a few things off him.”

Leading the lineout

“It adds a new dimension to the way you think about rugby. Sometimes when you’re orchestrating specific things you’d have nuances that you want to have done really well and it’s about trying to articulate that without coming across as a domineering individual. It’s a challenge and [forwards coach] Gert [Smal]’s fantastic at challenging us to get better.”

Being a lineout nerd

“I get a lot of slagging down below for studying lineouts but I went into the back row and started thinking like a back row so you don’t want to be associating yourself with lineouts and being the nerdy one. But you’d put in a good few hours, same as the hookers do with their throwing, and the kickers with their kicking.”

Learning from Paul O’Connell

“I’ve played alongside the best operator in the world in Paul and he’s only a phone call away if you ever want to chat about things. He’s a very good facilitator and it’s good to get a bit of information off him and take a bit of flak off him as well. It’s great. We don’t know it all and you’d appreciate it when he sees something totally different.”

Throwing lineouts

“A guy kicking for the post is an isolated incident in a game and I’d put hookers on the same block as them. You’re on show as well but the posts stay the same for kickers. Unfortunately for hookers there’s other elements involved.

Munster’s Ireland young guns

“Zebo’s been phenomenal this year, unbelievable in the things he’s been doing and he’s a very confident fella. David [Kilcoyne] is fantastic as well, like a breath of fresh air. He’s quite a unique character, a very funny fella. And put Mike Sherry and Stephen Archer alongside him and they’re three troublemakers, so they are. It’s a very messy front row.”

Munster’s win over Racing Metro

“It was a good platform for the guys to express themselves. There’s not many times you get an opportunity in that environment to show what you’ve got under pressure and the guys stood up.”

Rob Penney

“Rob doesn’t bring the outside pressure in, he’s his own man. He has such a good way of articulating what he wants to say and has such a positive outlook and guys perform well in a relaxed environment.”
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