Peter Jackson: Shades of Clough about Rog's outpost glory
Heineken Champions Cup Final, The Orange Velodrome, Marseille, France 28/5/2022
Jack Dempsey, the world’s supreme heavyweight boxer a century ago, famously redefined a champion as "someone who gets back up even when he can’t". Ronan O’Gara would long have known exactly what the old Manassa Mauler meant, painfully aware of how it felt to be down and out in the brutal arena of big-time professional sport.
The time, the place, the occasion, the result all conspired to dump the 21-year-old novice from Cork on the bones of his backside in front of 70,000 people.
