KIERAN SHANNON- Micko: All done with miracles
For almost a decade he was in and around the Ireland team, yet he never got to go to a World Cup. In Cardiff in both ’06 and ’08 he only came on as a sub; it so happens the best lock in world rugby, a chap called Paul O’Connell, played the same position. But that day this very day 10 years ago, Paulie was injured, just like he is now, and O’Driscoll was in. On the hour mark, he went in for their third try. They still needed a fourth and in the closing seconds John Kelly came up with it, sending all of Thomond into delirium and the world into shock. Yet O’Driscoll’s memories of that day isn’t so much the four tries or even Ronan O’Gara’s immortal conversion but rather the penalties he kicked, or rather the penalties they won, the way they gradually ground Gloucester down.
“Before ever getting a fourth try we had to first win the game. If you don’t win the game there’s no point in saying you got four tries. And there’s ways you go about it. You need to be on the field to sense it. You decide to take the three points, build it up to six, nine, and it starts to deflate them, their heads begin to drop, and then you’ll sneak in for a try. You have to be close to the opposition to see how they’re feeling. That’s a call that can only be made on the pitch. A coach can’t make it. Unless you’re out there you can’t say whether it’s the right or the wrong decision.
“So you make the call and get the questions after and often the experts will tell you that you were wrong. But that’s why those experts are writing as opposed to doing.”
He immediately says he doesn’t mean that as a form of disrespect for pundits but take it he doesn’t have huge time for them either. There is a directness, almost a bluntness, about Mick O’Driscoll. He has no time for any perceived form of waffling, sugarcoating or tip-toeing around something. While he would gladly wait around to travel back with a teammate who had to first catch an appointment with one of the team sport psychologists, he had a major problem when they were foisted upon the whole group, and thus, him; tough-mindedness was just something he felt he had naturally.
And as for coaches who looked at their feet whenever he’d ask why he wasn’t starting...
In recent months he’s been doing some work with the forwards from his alma mater in Presentation College, Cork, and when you ask him what’s the one thing he’s learned from being coached himself, he immediately replies: “Be straight up with your players. Don’t lie to players. It will catch you out. But it happens all the time.”
O’Driscoll played a lot for Munster, 207 times in fact, as well as 23 times for Ireland, but there were a lot of times he didn’t play for them. What way did he like to be told he wasn’t?
“By being straight up. When a coach would tell me I wasn’t playing, I’d say ‘No problem but tell me why.’ If I was told, ‘Donncha [O’Callaghan] and Paulie are going better than you,’ I was fine with that. But often a coach would tell you a lie. They’d hesitate and hum and haw and eventually come up with ‘Well, you missed that tackle two weeks ago’. ‘You’re playing really well but we’re still not playing you’. Why would they say that? It doesn’t make sense.
“Anthony Foley was always very honest but that’s because he was a player. He wouldn’t have skirted around it. Probably the best one I got was Eddie O’Sullivan. Before we played France in the 2006 Six Nations, Eddie brought me and just said straight up, ‘I’m picking Mal [O’Kelly] ahead of you and I have no reason, my gut feeling tells me to go with Mal so I’m going with him’. That was the best it ever got. He didn’t say to me, ‘Oh, I’m going with Mal because you didn’t do this’. Even if he had said ‘Mal is playing better than you’, I’d have had no problem with it.”
O’Callaghan in his recent book raved about O’Driscoll’s loyalty and leadership but wondered if “Micko secretly hated” himself and O’Connell. O’Driscoll can reveal that he didn’t. At times he did resent that a new season didn’t represent a clean slate, which was one of the reasons why he play in Perpignan for a couple of years, but ultimately he returned. He still wanted to play for Ireland — and the Trevor Brennan experience as well as his own had taught him playing in France wasn’t viewed as the best way of going about that — and he was still willing to be a colleague, rival and friend to O’Callaghan and O’Connell.
“In all my career I’ve never seen second rows not getting on. It’s not like hookers or out halves or scrum-halves where there’s only the one spot. I got on with every second row. I got on well with Malcolm O’Kelly. After that [2006] game in Paris, I came into the team against Scotland and it was Malcolm who first told me he had been dropped. And I got on particularly well with Paulie and Donncha.
“I’m not stupid. A long time ago I realised I was going to struggle to get ahead of the two lads. Paulie is Paulie; in my opinion the best lock in the world for over 10 years. He was our captain as well so he was going to play. And I knew it was going to be very difficult for the two of us to play together because there are two types of second rows — the Paulie-Victor Matfield-type who will carry ball and do a lot more open-field stuff, and then another lock who will do more of the tighter stuff.
“And I knew I was up against it because Paulie was a middle lineout jumper like myself while Donncha is brilliant at what he does. But at the end of the day I was still going to play a lot of rugby, at least 20 to 25 games a season.”
Whenever O’Connell was away on international duty, O’Driscoll invariably set the standard. Even when O’Connell returned, he often set the standard. When O’Connell wanted to stay on after training to work on his restarts, invariably O’Driscoll would be the one to stay on with him, even if he mightn’t initially have felt like it. If O’Driscoll wanted to get 15 extra hits in, he’d often tap O’Connell on the shoulder to stay behind. A workaholic like O’Callaghan recalls in his book how O’Driscoll would often be in the gym 20 minutes before him, “beasting” up. When Munster won the 2009 Magners League, the players voted O’Driscoll as their Player of the Year. He might have been outside their match-day 22 for some of their Heineken Cup games but he’d maintained and set the standards for the whole group.
He’d never sulk, regardless of how he might be dropped.
“You’d get over your disappointments within 24 hours. What else were you going to do? Let it burn you up? That wasn’t for me. The way I looked on it, you had to take emotion out of it. Once you did it, it was quite simple.”
Just because he could handle his emotions though isn’t to say O’Driscoll doesn’t have a sensitive side. To the contrary, looking out for people and taking care of them is something he’s literally made his business.
After retiring from rugby last spring, he has become the manager and owner of the Home Instead Senior Care branch. His office is from Blackpool but his carers work all over north Cork to look after the elderly in their own private homes. It’s completely different from rugby but it was his time in rugby that drew him to it. He often describes life in rugby as a “bubble”, removed from the real world, but even in that bubble there was no escaping from the real world. A couple of years ago the team’s fitness trainer, Paul Darbyshire, was diagnosed with motor neurones disease. While there was no saving Paul, there was so much caring for him and O’Driscoll was struck by the compassion of those who assisted him in his final months.
He’d also been a director and campaigner for Suicide Awareness, a role he continues in. A lot of the work is with young people. In recent months O’Driscoll was one of a team to do workshops with over 1500 Cork-based transition year students over a couple of days in City Hall. They covered the dangers of cyber-bullying, targeting both the vulnerable and especially the bullies. They cited an example of a Facebook post one kid received. Most of the audience initially laughed, until they discovered its recipient ended her life. They explored how words can hurt people in a way never intended. Another workshop is intended at County Hall in the coming weeks. Educating the young is key in O’Driscoll’s eyes.
But they’ve also seen what this recession has done to the middle-aged and especially the elderly — how depressed and isolated they can become. “If I owed the banks €50 million, I personally wouldn’t give a crap because of the crap other people are getting away with it. But unfortunately some people are succumbing to the pressure of owing a whole lot less.”
O’Driscoll goes to every client and their family, finds out what their interests and needs are, and then matches them accordingly with a proper carer. If it’s a man who loves to read and loves his GAA, then O’Driscoll will match him up with a carer who loves to read and chat about GAA.
The job suits him. He had a degree in accountancy and a postgrad from UCC and while it wasn’t related directly to this job, it suits him. He didn’t want a nine-to-five or a boss to keep answering to. This suits him, leading, helping people.
He doesn’t miss rugby. He misses the lads and the changing room but the game itself, not really. He wasn’t born into the game the way his old classmate Peter Stringer was. “Strings wanted to play for Munster since he was that high,” says O’Driscoll, his hand at the level of his hip. “Well, he’s still that high but you know what I mean. I grew up playing GAA. Rugby was just something I took up and played in Pres. I wasn’t looking to play for Munster or to make a career out of it.”
These days he’s happy just tipping along playing five-a-side-soccer twice a week with some mates from school. Up until recently he’d play squash with Anthony Horgan but that’s stopped, because, he laughs, “I was beating him easily and he eventually decided to get a job after three and a half years of doing nothing!”
He doesn’t go to the gym but he’s actually lost weight now that he doesn’t have to load up on sandwiches before bedtime to increase his power and size.
He’s only been at one match so far this year. The kids are both under three years of age and for a lot of the autumn he was in the States, in Nebraska where the franchise’s headquarters are based. But he still keeps in touch with his old team-mates and he still watches every Munster game.
He knows that franchise is in a different phase now. Back in the noughties they were the most prominent team in Europe, to such an extent he believes they should have won at least one more. “Would you think two Heineken Cups enough for the team that we had between 2000 and 2008?” he asks rhetorically.
“I think we should possibly have done a little bit better than we did under Tony [McGahan] too. My theory is that Tony went away from what he’s good at. He’s a great coach but he ended up being more a director of rugby. His strength was being on the training ground, not organising and managing people. He should have been coaching hands-on a lot more than he was by the end.”
Rob Penney, he insists, deserves time, regardless of how tomorrow goes. The recent Cardiff defeat shocked him but he believes they’ll get the result they want against Racing. They know what they have to do, a bit like they did against Gloucester 10 years ago this weekend.
They don’t have him to slot in for O’Connell, unfortunately. But they’ll be glad to know one of their Miracle men is still doing good works as well as good work.
