The king of Quins
Another time the same player that no less a figure than Clive Woodward described as the model professional was dismissed by Hook as “a rhinoceros on dope”.
Suffice to say, George didn’t exactly rate O’Shea’s rugby intelligence.
It says everything about Conor O’Shea as not just a rugby man but simply as a man that he and Hook can laugh about those remarks now, in the RTÉ studio, over a drink, as friends. Clearly, he possesses a considerable rugby brain — he wouldn’t be director of rugby at Harlequins and they wouldn’t be top of the English Premiership otherwise — but that he was big enough to not just forgive, but befriend Hook is, as Hook himself has acknowledged, to O’Shea’s everlasting credit.
To O’Shea, taking such a gracious approach was, well, a no-brainer.
“I know George ridiculed me in the past but that’s George. I actually get on unbelievably well with him and he actually has a huge amount of knowledge about the game. As wonderful as they’ve been, the current generation of players didn’t invent the game. Everyone is entitled to their opinion.
“Players mightn’t like that opinion, I didn’t like what George said about me, but you can’t take it too much to heart. The only opinion that counts is your own and that of your coaches. They know the game plan, they know the defensive patterns. As long as they back you, that’s all that matters.”
Beneath Hook’s bombastic exterior, O’Shea has got to know and see and like a softer, generous George. And to know it he says is to love him.
“George is an incredibly nice and loyal man. You see it in how he’s always talking about his family and looking out for them. He’s extremely charitable.
“He’s been out to Haiti. He does all that work with Comber [a charity that provides homes for disabled adults in Romania who grew up in orphanages and other institutions].
“George does all these speaking events and people assume he’s being paid when he’s not. He repays friends incredibly well. I have a lot of respect and time for George because basically he’s a good bloke.”
It’s typical of O’Shea’s measured, even compassionate manner to disapprove a person’s particular behaviour yet still have affection for that same person.
On New Year’s Day Harlequins’ scrum half Danny Care was stopped by police in his car and found to be driving with twice the legal limit of alcohol in his system. Care had his driving license suspended in court and was fined an estimated €12,000 by O’Shea and the club, yet later that week O’Shea described the same guy he’d just fined as “a special player and a brilliant bloke who made a terrible decision”.
“If I was to choose somebody at the club to look after my kids,” O’Shea said, “I’d pick Danny because I know he’d make them the centre of his universe.”
Dick Best, the former England coach and director of rugby at London Irish, once said O’Shea himself was the kind of guy you’d like your daughter to bring home. It’s easy to see why. As the way he handled Quin’s loss to Connacht and profusely praised his old friend Eric Elwood and his players and staff underlined, the man has a decency and an assuredness about him that shines through.
O’Shea’s tenure and style at Harlequins has all been about being simultaneously understanding and demanding in his dealings with his players. When he joined the club in the spring of 2010 it was only a year after the club’s reputation had been in tatters in the wake of the infamous Bloodgate episode but after appointing a man of O’Shea’s integrity and ability, Quins are now able to walk and play with their heads up.
As a player and later as a director of rugby at London Irish he was similarly able to instil standards but playing for Ireland he didn’t really have the authority or the confidence to do so. When he looks back on his 35-cap career that spanned from 1993 to 2000, he does with a mixture of pride and frustration.
It was a privilege to put on that green jersey, he insists, but it was a time when the game went from being amateur to professional and by the time his international career was coming to an end the Irish mindset still hadn’t quite made the transition.
“There were some guys in the amateur years that were professional. I’m thinking of the likes of Denis McBride, Brian Robinson; fellas that were just incredible in their work ethic. And then there were others that weren’t.
“I’ve always maintained that Ireland have always had the talent, always had the skill level, always had the passion but in the ’90s we could never last the 80 minutes because as a group we didn’t have the conditioning.
“There were a small number of players that didn’t train as hard as they could and that’s all it takes for the whole thing to collapse. There just wasn’t a culture of enough people wanting to do the extras; you know, staying on the pitch after training to work on some part of your game. It was more ‘Get off the pitch as quickly as you can.’
“I wasn’t one of those. As an amateur I’d do my gym work in the morning at six o’clock, I’d go to work, work a full day, and then train at night. As a professional I’d train as hard as I could but that ethos in general just wasn’t there. Some of the guys that I saw not training were a heck of a lot more talented than I was and that was hugely frustrating. All those stories of the smell of beer on Sunday morning gatherings were true.”
These days such standards wouldn’t be tolerated by senior players let alone management but back then there was no one with both the presence or world-class ability of an O’Driscoll, O’Gara or O’Connell. O’Shea for all his flair certainly didn’t feel he had the necessary standing within the group.
The culture and a hardly expansive game plan was doing little for his confidence which did little for his performance, which meant he in turn couldn’t really challenge or change more lax team-mates.
In Brendan Fanning’s fine book From There To Here, the closing moments of Ireland’s World Cup defeat to Argentina in Lens are recounted in detail as they typified Irish rugby in the ’90s. In trying to breach the tryline, Ireland crudely resorted to a 12-man lineout and Ireland tried to drive over the line from close range 11 times.
All the while O’Shea stood out on the wing unmarked, “flapping his arms” wrote Fanning, “like a drowning man”. He wasn’t a rhino; Ireland were. He wasn’t on dope. He just wasn’t on the ball enough.
“That passage just summed up for me my time in an Irish jersey,” O’Shea would say. “I was the only person within 40 yards. All it needed was for someone to look up, give the ball to Humps [David Humphreys], a cross kick, and I was in for a try.”
As it turned out that would be O’Shea’s penultimate game for Ireland. The following season he started in the opening Six Nations game against England but after that 50-18 hammering in Twickenham, in came the new breed of O’Gara, Stringer and Hayes and out went old hands like O’Shea.
Only the previous season he had been the Premiership Player of the Year but even he’ll admit that Warren Gatland made the right call in culling him. “My confidence was gone in terms of being able to impact at international level.”
The pity of it all is that Ireland, with young guns like O’Gara and O’Driscoll now unleashed, would go on to adopt the culture and kind of expansive game which O’Shea would have thrived in but the difference was they had a boldness about them, he had too much baggage. As it turned out, his club career would effectively finish that same year when he broke his leg and dislocated his ankle playing for London Irish.
11 months and three operations on from that injury, he announced his retirement at 31, saying that while he could have struggled on, he had to think of the kind of lifestyle he’d be able to have 10 years on.
Now that those 10 years have elapsed, he clearly made the right call. Physically he’s in good nick and in even better form, happily married with kids to English-born Alex. About the only thing nagging at Conor O’Shea these days is the Heineken Cup quarter-final slot Harlequins blew in Connacht, but he’s come to terms with it and seems to be at ease with everything, including his time playing for Ireland.
“I feel blessed to have the career I had. I made great friends and to this day I’m still regularly in touch with the likes of Eric [Elwood], David Humphreys, Mark McCall, Kevin Maggs; the lot of them really. Of course I would love to have been on a winning Irish team but it was a different era.”
Now Ireland are the model of professionalism in these islands. When he looks at the home nations heading into this upcoming championship, Ireland strike him as being best positioned of the lot. “Ireland are in a brilliant place. With the way the provinces are set up and all the young players coming through, I think Ireland will keep pushing the boundaries.”
Beat Wales and a Triple Crown at the least should be in their sights this spring. Even a Slam should. This team have the talent and the mindset to finally win in Paris again.
England’s results he reckons might have to get even worse before they get better. Everything for them is geared towards the 2015 World Cup while trying to undo the damage of the 2011 tournament. As someone involved at the high end of the English game he was appalled by the reports last autumn, or rather that they were leaked.
“English rugby is in a better state than people think. They’ve reached four of the last five U20 World Cup finals and the eldest of those players is just 24 so there are a lot of them coming through.
“They could struggle in this Six Nations because they’ve put a lot of inexperienced players in all at once but when Clive Woodward’s team were beaten 76-0 by Australia [in 1998] look who was on it — Jonny Wilkinson, Matt Dawson, Phil Vickery, Josh Lewsey. That’s the model they have to look at now.
“I was annoyed by how the report was leaked. If you came into this club — and we’re a pretty happy club, doing well — I’m sure there are players who I haven’t picked or chosen not to renew their contract that could slag off me or other members of the coaching staff if you asked them to write an anonymous note.
“Like making a big quote out of Nick Easter saying [after the quarter-final defeat to France] ‘That’s 35k down the toilet!’ … Nick doesn’t even know if he said it but he probably did because it’s the type of humour he has. I’ve been in the same dressing room where people have said something like that to break the ice. A comment like that should not be in the public domain!
“I’m sure if you had published the report Irish rugby conducted after the 2007 World Cup, you’d have found similar comments coming from and about people we’d all respect. That said, there’s no doubt that there needs to be a cultural shift in English rugby.”
O’Shea was even touted as a possible coach to help bring about that change but right now he’s happy at The Stoop. As director of rugby he effectively gets to select and recruit everyone, including the coaching staff and the players. Like England, this is a long-term project. Quins might be top of the Premiership but even before their shock defeat to Connacht he had publicly stated that they were far from being the finished article and this journey was going to include some peaks and troughs.
“We believe that if we make the opposition have to play the real us, then we can be competitive with anyone in Europe. That’s the belief that [beating] Munster in the Amlin [semi-final] gave us.
“We played a lot of games last year in which we didn’t quite nail the opportunities that we were getting but that was partly because we were wanting to play a certain style of rugby that people enjoyed watching and that the players enjoyed playing.
“At times that way can be scrappy; we’re making mistakes because players are possibly trying too much to offload the perfect ball. But you can’t say to a player that he has to make the perfect decision every time.
“You can’t come down on them like a ton of bricks if the pass didn’t work out. The way we encourage our players to make better decisions is by training with the ball, playing conditioned games, rather than train by drills.”
Against Connacht they had plenty of possession, plenty of territory, plenty of opportunities, but they didn’t take them and at crucial moments allowed the energy seep back into Connacht. It’s a term O’Shea uses a lot — “energy shifts” — and it’s one you’ll hear him mention more than once to the nation on the RTÉ panel over the coming months.
Even the idea of teaming up with Messrs Hook, Pope and McGurk again energises him. This gig with RTÉ isn’t just a way to keep the profile up or make a few extra bob.
“I love it. My brothers would tell you I’ve commentated all my life.
“If you’re sitting down at home with me, my wife will tell me to shut up, because that’s what I do when I watch a game, I’ll talk right through it. I watch a game of rugby like I’m watching my own team. I’m looking at work rate, defensive lines, attacking lines. I’m seeing people work or not, and if I see people shoot out of line defensively, then I offer my opinion.
“It doesn’t necessarily have to be the right opinion but as long as it’s a balanced opinion based on what’s going on in front of my eyes at that time, that’s all that matters.”
He’s always glad to have reason to get back over here. His father Jerome, still going strong at 80, played and won All Irelands for Kerry in the 1950s and imbued in his son a love of Kerry football and the region itself. When Conor proposed to Alex it could only have been in their beloved haunt of Kenmare. His name is regularly linked with moving back here any time there’s a possible coaching or high performance position possibly appearing but as O’Shea told anyone trying to connect him with any England post, he’s happy where he is, for now.
“I grew up loving sport in a family that loved sport and now my job is in sport. I couldn’t be in a better place.
“Where’s it taking me? I don’t know. I’ve never in my life planned things beyond the next game or season but I love what I do. I’ve yet to feel I’ve done a day’s work in this job.”
Though his international career could have been kinder to him, he’s one of the lucky guys. And one of the good ones too.
