Jarrad Butler serving up a treat for Connacht

By Brendan O’Brien

Kieran Keane didn’t get much right in the course of one fraught and awkward season in charge of Connacht but his take on Jarrad Butler proved to be right on the money.

Butler was one of seven new recruits walking through the doors in Galway for the first time two summers ago and the gruff Kiwi head coach spoke at the time of a man who was “a bit of a firecracker” who brought utility value across the back row.

“His character,” he explained, “is quite brilliant.” Butler has lived up to all that and more.

A native of Wellington who moved to Australia when he was 13, he represented his adopted country up to U20 level but the closest he came to full honours was when Wallaby coach Michael Cheika selected him for a Barbarians game in London.

The former Leinster coach lauded him at the time as an aggressive and hard-working back row who was “going fantastic for the Brumbies”.

He had broken through in Canberra in 2014 and ended that season as the club’s players’ player of the year.

He left for Ireland in 2017 with 70 Super Rugby caps to his name.

Butler was outstanding in his first season with Connacht. He wore the armband for the first time last April and, when John Muldoon departed for a coaching brief alongside Pat Lam at Bristol, it was the 27-year with a single season under his belt at the Sportsground who replaced him.

The method of selection revealed as much as the choice itself.

Andy Friend didn’t know much about Butler when he took over from Keane but he was savvy enough to understand that his remarkably quick elevation from newbie to skipper could give rise to the perception that it had been simply a case of handing the job to a fellow Aussie.

It absolutely wasn’t.

Friend has spoken of what he described as a “cultural process” with the playing squad, out of which arose a set of standard behaviours that they wanted to deliver as a collective. The next question centred on who among their six-man leadership group best embodied all that.

“Jarrad has been nominated out of that then to be captain,” Friend told RTÉ last month.

“Everything about the man I’ve been impressed with. He is a very, very, very good footballer and instinctively sees the game. He is the right player to lead Connacht.”

Butler has previous in being identified as a man with something special to offer. He wasn’t long in Australia when he was pegged as a potential professional rugby player and awarded a scholarship to a renowned nursery, the Southport School in Queensland. And he demonstrated nascent leadership abilities when captaining the Canberra Vikings in the inaugural National Rugby Championship in 2014.

Leading a professional top-tier side on the other side of the world is a quantum leap from there, it should be said, and it’s worth pointing out here that the other three provincial captains this season are Jonathan Sexton, Peter O’Mahony and Rory Best.

That’s exalted company for a man to keep, not to mention the task involved in living up to a legend like Muldoon, but Butler hasn’t let the extra responsibility change his approach.

“Not so much. It’s been a pretty exciting first four weeks. I’ve been learning on the fly a little bit, said Butler who misses today’s visit of Leinster to Galway through injury.

“It’s been made easier with a lot of help from the coaches: after the game and before the game, throughout the week and, more important, from the leaders who are in the team during the game.

“We have got a lot of experienced guys on the field and they all look after their own areas, which makes the management so much easier. I can just focus on doing what I need to do in so far as leading by example, which I think is my best quality.”

That he didn’t earn a cap for Australia is at least in part due to the competition for places at the back of the scrum Down Under and, while he qualifies for Ireland under residency rules in 2020, there will be an even lengthier queue to Joe Schmidt’s door by then.

If you were being selfish as a Connacht supporter you would be hoping the Test arena remains alien to him, given Connacht clearly suffered from the absence of Bundee Aki and other Ireland players during the international windows last term.

That knowledge makes assets such as a fit Butler all the more precious in a squad that boasts an impressive and competitive first XV but one which suffers in terms of depth when compared to the likes of Leinster who pitch up in the west today.