Ronan O'Gara: Hyron Andrews' death makes you realise just how fragile everything is
A minute of silence is observed in memory of Lion's player Hyron Diego Andrews before the Champions Cup group A match between the Bulls and Stade Francais at the Loftus Versfeld Stadium in Pretoria. Pic: Phil Magakoe/Getty
The Bataclan slaughter in Paris in 2015. Axel in Paris a year later. The Christchurch terror attacks in 2019, and the death of young Hyron Andrews last Saturday outside La Rochelle.
You can treat these episodes like isolated detonations for sure, but no one around here is going to pretend being up too close and very personal to these deaths and disasters doesn’t give pause for thought.
There was a moment in the coaches box on Saturday in the Champions Cup game against the Jo’burg Lions where everything just felt passive and a little bereft.
The sporting crux of all that – such as it was - was that the South Africans, in their Champions Cup debut, came out playing with fire and thunder.
From a 5m scrum, their centre Henco van Wyk ran over a couple of our lads in the third minute with a statement try to open it up. Understandably, they were emotionally super-charged.
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For our players it was all very uncomfortable pummelling into broken young men.
Andrews only joined the club last year from Sale so I’m not sure it’s comparable to the loss to Munster of an icon like Anthony Foley ten years ago, but it was plain to see that the Lions players were treading a fine line between passion and grief, between pride and rage, bravery and collapse.
Therefore, it’s doubly troubling to be countering the sadness with the inevitable professional instincts of looking for a performance from your own players. We were in a lose-lose situation and played like we were.
When the captain's run finished lunchtime Friday it felt natural to get ourselves to the Lions team on Sainte-Marie de Ré to show our support. The only thing I could think of was how beyond freaky this was to be dealing with ten years to the morning when Garrett Fitzgerald rang me in Paris about Axel.
I like that Hotel Atalante here, but I can’t ever look at it the same now, you get out of the car and witness the different reactions of Hyron’s team mates and you think ‘Oh my God…’
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At that stage, I took it as read that Saturday’s game was off. You hear these things at your captain’s run and the game is meant to be the next day, it’s an understandable presumption. But then other considerations offer an alternative perspective, not least the wishes of the Lions players themselves.
In a state of shock, perhaps they thought it better to get their professional business done before the realisation and the sad stiffness sinks in. That they have headed onto Scotland to face Edinburgh this Friday night in the URC must be incredibly difficult and challenging.
Not least while the remains of their colleague stayed for autopsy investigation in France. What they would have needed is to return to their families in Johannesburg. It seems beyond cruel. This has been the worst week of their professional lives.
Of course, we had to also maintain responsibilities to our own La Rochelle players in the moment. We knew Friday there were three scenarios being discussed but had no influence on them – the game was off, it was going ahead Saturday or delayed until Sunday.
But it soon became clear that the Lions weren’t getting on a flight out of France to anywhere without saluting their fallen friend where they thought it best – on the pitch at Marcel Deflandre. It was the club’s first ever Champions Cup game, but they may also have thought – though it was never said – how can we come back to this place again for a refixture with all the dreadful flashbacks that could evoke?
Seeing them at the hotel, they were evidently stunned. It’s an environment where expecting cold, reasoned thinking is totally unreasonable. Even as an outsider, driving there and leaving later, there’s too much to calibrate. The fickleness of life.
The game finished 31-14 to us, like that matters. The whole thing felt weird Saturday. There was this unspoken sense: what are we doing here? No one said it but everyone articulated it with their eyes.
By the by, the result was nowhere near as comprehensive as that score may suggest. There was a forward pass by them (for a try) that could have made it 24-21 with five minutes remaining. Had we restarted by kicking to them, with the momentum and the emotion very much in their corner, it would have tightened everything up for us, and right quick. We just needed to get out of there.
Everyone could see our boys were not really up for it either, there was one emotionally charged side on the field, and it wasn’t the one with the crowd behind them.
Thankfully, a bad, sad day ended well. The Lions all came into our dressing room, we mingled and talked, we didn’t just have one beer, we had three or four, because everyone just felt so stressed and people needed to vent.
This weekend we face Top 14 champions Bordeaux Begles on Sunday, and while everyone here knows that performance last Saturday wouldn’t beat Mallow, we’ve been slow to get into them.
Sometimes we realise how fragile everything actually is…
