Ronan O'Gara: Giving all of yourself, every morsel, to the job
CONNECTED: Ronan O'Gara with his La Rochelle players ahead of last Friday's Top 14 semi-final in Lille against Racing 92. "I'm more connected to this group than I have been at any stage since coming home from New Zealand."
THE ledger on the longest season is almost in. The crude metric of La Rochelle’s campaign will be determined by Friday night's Top 14 final in Paris against Toulouse. We’ve been in a Champions Cup final and now a Top 14 decider. Losing both seems light years removed from what victory and a first Bouclier in the club’s 123-year history would mean, and there’s a reason for that. Trophies are the benchmark by which most top teams are judged, and it’s something we are quite comfortable with because that means La Rochelle are in the ‘top teams’ conversation.
We lose Friday night and I’ll be absolutely sick, like physically unwell, for four days before managing to wash it out of the system. Either way, though, we are on the map now. We are respected, irrespective of how the final goes. We are gone from upstarts to the new kids on the block. We are nowhere near the aristocrats of French rugby but that’s what we aim to be in time. There’s no point being a flash in the pan. But let’s not kid ourselves or shy away from tonight – it’s an unbelievably good story and season climax if we get over the line and win silverware at the Stade de France.
