Lionhearted Legend - Interview with Peter Stringer
It’s 15 years ago this very month that he broke into the Irish team and the Irish public imagination along with it: Italy’s first Six Nations was his first, too.
Any of us around at that time has the image etched forever in the mind: himself and O’Gara either side of Papa Gaillimh for the national anthem with three other debutants — Shane Horgan, Bull Hayes and Simon Easterby — elsewhere along the line. That first day out — and win — against Scotland, the nerves and occasion got to a couple of them; O’Gara in his autobiography would talk about how for the next day against the Italians he and Stringer came up with different calls to buy him some more time at that level. It was ‘10’ if he was kicking, ‘Chilli’ if he was running.
“At that level,” he’d reflect, “you need every second you can get.” It worked. They thrived. They belonged. It was their kind of stage.
“I always loved the whole anticipation and atmosphere that went with big games,” says Stringer.
“It made me all the more excited. Obviously you want to win and to perform but I found the best chance to do both was to first of all enjoy it. I always got a great buzz out of playing in games like that.”
Now he doesn’t, at least on the international scene. He’s never spoken to Joe Schmidt. His international caps tally stalled on 98 back in 2011 — which is 40 more than any other scrum-half this country has produced.
But he himself didn’t stall. At 37, he’s still playing, pushing, driving himself and everyone else around him on, the last man standing of those who stood in that line with Mick Galwey that day.
It’s Wednesday just past when we catch up with him. It might be an international week with four of his clubmates starting with England alone but Stringer isn’t one for putting the feet up and relaxing in Bath.
While most of his remaining team-mates had the day off, he only finished up there at 3pm. Earlier on he was down in the Rec with some of the kickers, firing them bullets to shoot and getting in some kicking of his own. Then he popped into the gym in town as it’s so near his own home that’s also within the charming medieval stone walls that embrace rather than confine you here. He loves where he is. He still loves what he does. His contract with Bath expires at the end of the season but he sees himself still playing there or somewhere else after that.
“I’d played here a few times before over the years and always liked it. It’s a small place but people love their rugby here. Every week it’s a sellout, especially with us competing both for the Champions Cup and the Premiership. And I’ve always said that as long as I can play and I still love it, I will. As long as the body and mind are working together and you’re still able to produce, then keep playing.
“When one of the two of them starts to act up, then you know it’s time to finish. From talking to other lads who have retired, they always have had a good idea when it’s their last year. But I’m not at that point yet.”
It’s more than the change of scenery that’s rejuvenated him. There’s been a change of diet. Two years ago just before he joined Bath, he took a food intolerance test and found he rolled better without bread, pasta and cutting down on his dairy as he’d a slight allergy to cow’s milk and wheat. His energy levels have never been better.
In many ways Stringer has never seemed to either look or feel his age. John Hayes remembers coming across him for the first time back in 1999 and laughing at Stringer driving his father’s Ford Scorpio, the smallest man in the place with the biggest car in the place.
“I swear to God, he was looking out through the steering wheel instead of over it,” Hayes would recall in his own autobiography. “When he picked up the ball in training it looked as big as a basketball in front of him. Strings looked more like an altar boy than a rugby player.”
That was until he picked up that basketball and started zapping it around and buzzing around.
That first season in Munster, he started out as third in line at scrum-half, behind Brian O’Meara and Tom Tierney. In a few weeks there was no doubt he was first.
The rest is Munster history, since he’d become such a part of it. Twelve Heineken Cup quarter- finals, eight semi-finals, four finals, two wins, with Stringer providing the game-changing try in one of them.
There was a nice symmetry to it all — until there wasn’t. By 2011, there were again three quality scrum-halves on the Munster roster and this time he was the veteran in third in the pecking order.
He’d like to think that he handled it as well as anyone could, that he was as much a team player as any man in those circumstances could. But he won’t lie. What he took as a challenge was challenging, getting that balance right in competing and cooperating with rivals and protégés Conor Murray and Tomás Ó’Leary.
“As a unit, the scrum-halves would always be doing our extras together, kicking and passing, so you’d form something of a bond that way. Then you could be sitting in a room doing video analysis with them and the out-halves and you’re passing on information that you can see that they might not be familiar with. And it is difficult because you want to be the one out there who’s doing it. And you find yourself nearly asking yourself: should I be passing on what I can see and do to other guys? But that’s a selfish way to look at it. That’s not the way you should look at it.
“I’ve become even more accustomed to [sharing] over the last few years with the younger players we’ve had coming through with Bath. It’s about passing on what you know for the better of the team.
“That’s the nature of sport and competition so I came to see it as a challenge, to help bring out the best in me as a player, a team-mate, a person and all that in my team-mates as well.
“And the other way I’ve also looked at it is that it’s one thing being able to see something on video and another being able to execute it on game day.
“I was always able to distinguish between both those two things and have always had confidence in my own ability to be able to do those two things.”
Nowhere was that selflessness and belief more evident and rewarded than a midweek November night in 2008. The All Blacks were back in Thomond, a nod to their famous visit and defeat 30 years earlier. Munster were without their starting internationals, held back for Ireland’s test against the Kiwis later that week. Only that Stringer stood up to them and played like the starting and starring international that he still viewed himself as.
In the public memory Munster’s respectful defiance that day was exemplified by the Munster haka performed by their own New Zealand contingent but after that, Stringer led the way and charge.
His passing was imperious, particularly for the way he off-loaded for Barry Murphy’s try. He was creamed making that pass. Floored. Until he bounced back up again, ready for more. With Munster, he was always ready for more.
By 2011, though, it didn’t seem like they wanted any more of him. In the previous two seasons he’d only been given six starts. So he’d go on loan, to Saracens, then Newcastle. Each time he came back, expecting a chance in red, but it didn’t come.
“You can appreciate that a coach can’t play everybody all the time. That’s just the nature of having a squad of 40 players. But my thing was that I felt that I didn’t really get a fair crack. With Conor away at the World Cup, myself and Duncan [Williams] were there and I didn’t start a game for a few months. If you get a few games and you’re not playing well, no excuses, you only have yourself to blame, but you want a bit of game time to prove yourself. That wasn’t there so I approached the coaches. I had the opportunity to play elsewhere and they seemed happy to see me go.”
Change was a bit frightening but even more so refreshing, exhilarating even. First port of call was Saracens. Now that was different. They were different. Not just because they trained in the one spot, as opposed to one day in Limerick, the next in Cork. This crew once trained in Cape Town the week before one Heineken Cup game.
“They were very much into promoting positivity all the time. Even in England, they’d be viewed as mavericks. We went to South Africa that time before playing Biarritz. We’d great weather, some great training sessions out there, then flew back into Heathrow the night before the game. We ended up winning, but for me it was bizarre. That would never have happened anywhere else in rugby. Certainly not Munster.
“In Saracens, the coaches in the team and video meetings were very much looking about looking at the positives. They would rarely put up negative moments and criticise players in front of other players.
“Unless something really negative had happened, they would refrain from saying it in front of the other guys.”
Maybe at Munster they could sometimes outdo confronting and criticising each other. For Stringer though he would err more towards his home province’s approach.
“There was always a great respect between the players, that if you had something to say, good or bad, you were to say it because it wouldn’t be taken to heart. I can see value in both sides. But when fellas hold back, I think you’re asking for trouble. Get it out there and deal with it. Someone like ROG, he might not always tell me what I wanted to hear but almost always it was what I needed to hear.”
At this point in his career though, he’s thrived in hearing new voices and being a new voice.
When you’re almost 15 years playing with Munster you and everything else can become institutionalised, fixed. You take things for granted or can be taken for granted. In England, he’s relished in realising some old maxims are new. It’s a role he’s embraced and advice in Bath they’ve soaked up too, from their youngest players to their coaches. In Bath, he’s almost like another assistant coach, and an undoubted mentor, a miniature — in size only — Gaillimh.
George Ford in particular has thrived under his wing. “Strings has been unbelievable for me as well as for all of the younger players here,” Ford has said. “He brings a bit of calmness to the team, he’s very level-headed and he probably controls the younger lads when we’re off task a bit.”
The England out-half is still a month shy of his 22nd birthday but whatever about playing in the Premiership, it seems as if he’s known Stringer forever. They first met and connected when George was still in primary school. His father Mike was part of the Irish coaching staff and one day in training camp in Limerick, asked Stringer if he could mind his two sons for awhile after training. Stringer duly took them, including a young George, off for ice cream. Now that they’re adults playing for a Bath side coached by Ford’s father, they go for coffee, or more often and favourably for the pair of them, for extras on the training ground.
“To be fair to the kid he’s got the mentality and personality of a professional,” says Stringer. “I’ve been talking to him constantly at training to demand the best from other people and demand more from me. If something isn’t good enough, if a pass isn’t on point to him, he needs to let us know, be more vocal.”
In being more of a Gaillimh, he can see the need for his younger out-half partner to be more of a ROG.
They don’t always play together with Bath. While last season Stringer was a regular starter, this year he’s either being coming off the bench or even staying on it. It’s not ideally how he’d want it, but unlike his last couple of seasons with Munster, he still feels valued and still feels like a contributor, not just someone who feels he can make a contribution. They’re tied with Northampton at the top of the Premiership, with Stringer having played minutes in half their games. They’re through to the quarter-finals of the Champions Cup with an away game to Leinster. He’ll see Lansdowne Road again.
He didn’t get a proper farewell from Munster. Maybe he’ll get one from their old rivals in the ground he stood for that anthem alongside Galwey 15 years ago.
And even with that he won’t be saying goodbye to the game that he loves.
