Keith Wood: Anthony Foley news felt like some sort of sick joke

Former Irish rugby international Keith Wood has said the death of his former teammate Anthony Foley was almost like “some sort of sick joke that couldn’t obviously be true”.

Tue, 18 Oct, 2016 - 01:00

Joe Leogue

“It didn’t make any sense yesterday, it doesn’t make any sense today, and it’s just unbelievably disturbing,” Mr Wood said yesterday.

Wood paid an emotional tribute to the late Munster coach on the Pat Kenny show on Newstalk, and discussed growing up with Foley, who he had known since he was a young boy in Killaloe, Co Clare.

“He was a man who loved sport, who loved the town, who was shy but sociable, driven beyond all belief from as early an age as I can remember,” said Wood.

“I remember calling up to his house, he must have been 12 or 13 years of age and he was sitting down with his father. The curtains were drawn in the room and they had an old battered video recorder and they were rewinding everything.

"He was just dedicated to the sport, to getting better at it. This was the middle of the summer, in the heat. Two smelly men, sitting inside, going over hours and hours and hours of videotape,” he said.

He said Foley had an “innate ability to read a game in rugby”.

“He was never the fittest or fastest guy, but he was the smartest guy that I played on the field with, and he was invariably wherever the ball was,” he said.

Wood said he found Foley’s death particularly upsetting because their sons are also good friends.

“The pleasure Anthony used to get going down to a hurling match, he was so excited by it, to see his kids playing hurling now they were at the age too, it’s just unbelievably sad,” he said.

“It’s just wrong. It doesn’t make any sense. It brings a sense of mortality very close, I think there was a huge shock around the country, for a young man to fall in his pomp, but also the fact that he would have touched a huge amount of lives.”

Wood said it was clear from his days in St Munchin’s School in Limerick that Anthony Foley was a special talent.

“He was able to do everything, he had all the skills,” he said.

“Everywhere he played and did anything there was a trophy in his hand at the end of it. It wasn’t only that he was a good player, he knew how to win.”

He said that coaching was a natural progression for Foley because he “was a coach since he was 13 years of age”.

Wood said Foley was the gel for the good players around him to play better, and that he didn’t get the credit he deserved as a player.

“I would say quite simply, when you had him at the back of the scrum you never had to think what was happening. He led from there, he led in the manner in which he played but he did the right thing at the right time nearly all the time,” he said.

Wood said it was surreal to talk in the past tense, that it was “dreadful” for his father to have to bury his son and that it was “heartbreaking” for Foley’s two young sons to have to go on without a father.

He also fondly recalled a man with a ‘wicked, dry sense of humour’.