French tradition, Irish bottle and the new green wave
A hotel room in Barcelona seems an odd place to begin, when Irish people are high-fiving their way across France, coming down from the highveld in South Africa, and descending on Manchester, where our U20 rugby boys have advanced to a World Cup final
Some poor souls like this one exist in a bubble, a bubble that explodes at the Camp Nou this evening in front of 98,000 fans. I exist not alone in this bubble. All of French rugby is here, extraordinary though that might seem in the midst of the European football championships.
The Bouclier de Brennus, or final of the Top 14 in old money, lives and breathes on an elevated plain of importance in French rugby. The rugby family here are different animals this week. It’s 27 years since Racing 92 won a Bouclier, and club stalwarts with a medal are treated with a reverence I only understand now. It’s like members of the Mayo All- Ireland winners in 1951, or the Offaly team of 82. A player here is defined by his Boucliers.
We’ve been in this bubble for months and months now. It’s scary. I’m finding it tough connecting to the world outside my house and my club. Racing have been on a roll now for 20 successive weeks, and it all ends tonight against Toulon. The difficulty readjusting to normal life next week should be very interesting.
Twenty weeks in a row going to war with lads. It’s brilliant from my point of view, because you’d have the knickers in a twist in Ireland if you went four weekends in a row. Of course, when the season does crash, it’ll be interesting to see where the head is, because at the minute, it’s just review, preview, motivate players and see where you are. You don’t get time to come up for air.
All welcome for brunch in my place on Sunday before we do a number on the locals..😜⚽️⚽️⚽️🇮🇪🇮🇪🇮🇪🇮🇪🇫🇷 Allez Ireland
— Ronan O Gara (@RonanOGara10) June 22, 2016
We haven’t lost since the Champions Cup final against Saracens. When you’re winning you don’t have to do much, but you have to find the balance between poking them and keeping their confidence high.
Last Friday night, we won a Top 14 semi-final the likes of which I have seldom if ever been involved in.
We had Clermont beaten at one stage. All of a sudden the game is gone from you and we are 33-27 down with the clock in red. The remarkable thing is the lads found bottle and mental strength to keep it going. It says a lot about the character of the players and the group that they found a way to win, there’s no other way of putting it. And it’s massively gratifying that something we have tried very hard to work on seems to be a part of the group’s DNA now.
Juan Imhoff’s try left one bit of work to do. A 40m conversion for Dan Carter. For anyone watching it, we all had a shared thought: If I want anyone in the world standing over this kick, it’s this guy.
My only fret was that one of the Clermont guys would take a flier and attempt a charge down, but Dan even had that possibility factored in, he told me later. He took the ball out another 15 yards and was closer to the 10 yard line than the 22 by the time he kicked, which was bizarre.
He’s not thinking about missing, the angle of difficult, hitting the post. It’s just, can they charge me down, which is phenomenal. In the coach’s box we were humming over bringing Johann Goosen into 10 and bringing in the fresh legs of our explosive Fijian Albert Vulivuli into the centre. But a five-pointer is essentially a seven-pointer when you’re thinking ‘Carter’s going to kick it anyway, even if it’s in the corner’. What an advantage to have, to give those people on the pitch that extra little bit of motivation to go after it because, Dan’s going to convert 49 times out of 50.
When you have that and the boot of Johann Goosen converting from over 50m, these are tremendous assets. Against Clermont, Eddy Ben Arous poached a ball three yards on our side of the halfway, penalty, and Goosen steps up. That is a three-pointer very few players in the world can offer.
Toulon will be without Ma’a Nonu tonight, according to their coach Bernard Laporte. He received a concussive whack last week against Montpellier, and is likely to be replaced at centre by Mathieu Bastereaud.
It says everything about Nonu that we’d prefer to be facing Bastareaud. There’s a difference with an All Black World Cup winner who knows what games to peak for. He had comfortably his best game of the season last week and would have gone up another level for tonight. Dan can do that for us, but Nonu is an exceptional player with extreme power and a classy passing game which is very under-rated. Chris Masoe won three Heineken Cups down in Toulon. That he is now in our colours is a big plus. It was a shrewd signing, relieving them of a winning mentality that has been priceless to Racing.
The rewards tonight are great. The victors will claim €1m from the Top 14 play off pot, the losers take half that amount. But no-one will be onto that tomorrow morning when we come up for air after the longest season. It’s hard to credit at the tail end of a World Cup campaign that some Top 14 teams are back for pre-season in a week’s time. Because players, under legislation, must take four weeks off, Racing will return for pre-season at the end of July — and the first friendly is August 5, the first round of the Top 14 on August 20.
There may never be another season like it.
he Irish rugby team have their own season climax to attend to. And to reshape. Joe Schmidt and his players should and will be sick after Ellis Park last Saturday. Altitude? No I’ve played there. I don’t believe that. Whatever happened, no one can dispute it was the biggest disappointment in Irish rugby in a long, long time. Well you’re 19-3 and 26-10 up away from home, with a first test in the bag, and history beckoning, we return to the achilles heel issue: is Ireland a once-off type of team? Schmidt is a Kiwi and they don’t do moral victory. Those days are over for Irish rugby.
South Africa are average but the confidence they got from the last 40 minutes will stand to them tomorrow in Port Elizabeth. They have very little direction from Elton Jantjies at 10, more that they picked up some momentum with a local flavour — and that’s not a good thing to be facing. The thing with Ireland is they have to get angry. Andrew Trimble has done exceptionally well on this tour and I like the way he remarked to being taken seriously at this level, you got to back it up. Appropriate words. That’s all that needs to be said. They didn’t back it up after Newlands so it’s back to the drawing board. Mental resilience is everything.
These Irish players are so fit and so well managed fatigue and altitude problems are not legit excuses. Contrast with a fella playing 20 games and being in the squad for 20 weeks in a row? I understand test rugby is a level above Top 14, but the body will go where the mind wants it to go.
The progress of the Ireland U20s on the other hand has been heart-lifting. On the pitch, there’s a bunch of clinical young lads. Off it too, it’s brilliant to see Peter Malone, the head of the Munster academy, and forwards coach for the 20s, getting his day in the sun. He’s taking a hammering in recent times in his own province because he was an easy target when the conveyor belt wasn’t rolling off home bred stars. Let’s have a crack off the fella in charge of the Academy.... But he’s obviously a very good rugby person. It sums up sport: One minute you’re on your knees, the next minute you’re on top of the world. Son when you’re decision making you have to let the things unfold, don’t you.
It has to be, because some of the rugby is brilliant. If our U20s, everything in the lead to is really well, I mean, to wallop a team like Argentina in a semi-final is probably unheard of at that level. Ireland won’t make the mistakes tomorrow against England that South Africa made in the other semi. Ireland look so well-drilled. Even at ruck time, you had young fellas going low, they’re all prepared for a counter-ruck, everyone was scanning in front of them.
And then they have a few X Factor players that can be the difference. Every winning team has those lads — Deegan, Ryan, Stockdale, Daly in the centre. The latter is so positive, every time he makes that extra yard, which makes a difference in the whole phase play.
All very positive stuff for the future.
For some of us, however, the future is in a few hours’ time.
