Kieran Shannon: By being such a student of winning, Ronan O’Gara has become one of its best teachers

Outside of actually shadowing and meeting Ronan O’Gara, his columns are essentially coaching masterclasses, regardless of what your sport is

Ronan O’Gara has managed to get his players and club to appreciate the urgency of now while having an eye to being even better tomorrow. Picture: INPHO/Dave Winter

The same year Ronan O’Gara went from being a player to a coach, he brought out the second though hardly last book he’ll ever do, appropriately-titled, given his candid nature, Unguarded.

In its penultimate chapter, as he documented his first preseason as part of the coaching staff at Racing 92, he revealed how jotting things down was a habit of his regardless of whether he had an upcoming book or column to do for public consumption.

“I have drills written down in diaries from the last 10 years [as a player] and I’ve been scouring them to devise new drills,” he’d inform us, and if anything his journaling would be going to another level that summer of 2013 now that he was a coach.

It wouldn’t be just to X and Os and grids he’d be making a note of. While many aspiring young coaches, especially former players and stars, can fall into the trap of being obsessed with what to coach, O’Gara hinted that he’d both the awareness and the humility to recognise that he’d to find out how to coach.

“I know an awful lot about attacking play and backline play, but nothing about presenting them as a coach,” he’d say. “I need to learn.”

While he was one of the biggest names in European rugby, a master of the number 10 position, he was now an apprentice all over again. And so instead of just being “a kicking coach and then switching off”, he’d be closely observing and reflecting on how the backs coach, a Laurent Labit, operated and interacted with the players.

“Every day I’ve kept notes,” he’d claim. “I’ve written everything down. At the end of my first season here I’ll have a note of what has been done each day every week.”

You can imagine, now that he’s into his eighth season as a coach, all the notes and nuggets that he’s subsequently scribbled down: now there’s the meat of a terrific book, one, that could borrow the sub-title of the late great David Halberstam’s biography on Bill Belichick — The Education of A Coach.

Thankfully though, as we await that tome, we’ve had the next best thing in the form of his weekly columns for this paper.

While the coming weeks and months will remind just how reticent and even paranoid most inter-county GAA set-ups and particularly managers can be, O’Gara has remarkably been able to continue speak forthrightly on all matters rugby and more on such platforms as this paper, Off The Ball and Virgin Media without seeming to compromise his energy, focus or, most importantly, his team.

Only someone with his charisma, authority, and judgement would be able to pull it off.

Last Friday’s column for this paper typified it, letting us — and Leinster — know that he’d moles informing him that Leo Cullen’s set-up did a full-on training session with their Champions Cup team the day before their recent Rainbow Cup game against Munster.

He took his into his own team’s training ground too, again something that would be anathematic to a county set-up this side of a breakthrough.

How they’ve become a closer unit without being the finished product. The previous week he outlined how they draw vertical red lines across the field at five-metre intervals and encourage them to run straight and hard to enact their much-heralded Keep The Ball Alive philosophy.

In doing so, O’Gara is exhibiting a certain assuredness but also a generosity too.

Outside of actually shadowing and meeting him — something his fellow Corkonian Roy Keane should consider if he has any aspirations of entering management again and effectively interacting with the modern athlete — his columns are essentially coaching masterclasses, regardless of what your sport is. They’re less What I Think or What I Know but rather What I Learned — The Hard Way — which you might want to learn too.

“I know I can get my point across,” he wrote a couple of weeks ago, again something he couldn’t have written in 2013.

“That’s not being presumptive because I’ve seen the other side too, that shattering moment as a coach when you feel helpless and worthless.”

On reflection, he was a “callow coach” back when he started in Racing.

It was at Crusaders he’d truly learn the importance of positivity and connection and how to make it pervasive throughout a whole club. “[That] organisation has so much stability in a business where there’s not meant to be any,” he’d write and it’s obvious from his recent columns — and results — that’s what he has helped bring to the once chaotic world that was French club rugby.

Somehow he’s managed to get his players and club to appreciate the urgency of now while having an eye to being even better tomorrow. Win this European Champions Cup final and-or the Top 14, the project, the process, will continue, which is why he’s signed on to stay there for another three years.

In Unguarded, O’Gara wrote about Munster: “In my head I’m going back there some day. That’s why I’m doing everything possible to make myself a better coach — in order to return to Munster.”

He’s patently a better now, just as there’s a project to be done at Munster; as he’d frankly remark last month: “There’s a disconnect somewhere. Losing the big ones has become the norm. Munster has lost that aura.”

But maybe his motives have changed, or at least he’s more aware of his priorities. In his column he’s spoken about how it would be untimely and ultimately unfair to uproot his kids from their current schools.

And whatever about it being the right time for Munster to come get him, it would be the wrong time to leave La Rochelle.

“We are [still] early in our understanding of what consistency of preparation looks like, what consistency of behaviour looks like,” he wrote here last week.

Although his original decision in 2013 to leave Munster for France was the ultimate example of leaving your comfort zone, now the corollary of that arises. To use the line that the great US De Mattha High school basketball coach Morgan Wooten would say in declining multiple top college and even NBA gigs: “Why mess with happiness?”

Right now he is happy staying in La Rochelle but not content. He has trophies to win, a team to improve, and scope still to improve himself. Like how he copes with undesirable calls by the officials.

“It’s an area I’m working hard on,” he also wrote last month. “If referee angst is consuming all your energy as a coach, then you obviously have your own team sorted, and I don’t have mine anywhere near sorted.”

He’s getting there though, as Leinster learned at the weekend.

By being such a student of winning, he’s now one of its best teachers.