Prop who takes no bull

JOHN HAYES has been central to an unusually substantial collection of Munster victories in France.

Few supporters of the province will ever forget his great try against Toulouse in Bordeaux in the 2000 quarter-final of the Heineken Cup.

However, if you fear that the wins over Colomiers, Toulouse, Stade Francais and Castres, will give Hayes and his team-mates a false sense of complacency entering this afternoon’s all-important clash with Perpignan, fear not.

“Winning for the first time at Colomiers in 1999 was a great feeling, it showed that it could be done but it’s never easy,” says John.

“If we were playing teams like Castres, whom we’ve come up against a few times, we’d know what to expect whereas we haven’t met Perpignan for five years so it’s different. They beat Gloucester here and that shows how good they are,” he says.

Given that he stands 6ft 4ins and weighs in fit at 19 stone, it is hardly surprising that John Hayes began his rugby career as a second-row forward and it was only on his return from a stint in New Zealand that he switched to the front-row.

As he adapted to his new role, it so happened that the demands on top-class props were also changing and becoming more varied and significant.

Results confirm that cometh the hour, cometh the man, even if John Hayes’s innate humility would never allow him to think any such thing.

“The number on your back counts at scrum and line-out where you perform your primary duties like scrummaging and lifting,” he points out.

“After that, though, the game has changed hugely and there are many other responsibilities and keeping a defensive line is one of them,” he says.

Those who claim to know these things contend that John Hayes remains a poor scrummager and that because of his physique, nothing will change in that respect. There are those, though, who beg to differ.

His Munster coaches Declan Kidney and Alan Gaffney lavish praise on his willingness to work hard and absorb sound advice.

“People often ask me what makes the Munster team special and I would point to the work ethic of people like John Hayes,” Kidney said at the height of last season’s campaign.

“His scrummaging is criticised but he is now a true international scrummager and he has proved that at the highest level. He has not allowed his work rate around the pitch to dip so as to improve another part of his game.

“He is always prepared to do what is best for the team rather than for himself.”

The bigger you are, the better you should be in a physical game like rugby, especially when you’re in the thick of the action from start to finish.

However, that doesn’t necessarily apply to prop forwards and I wondered whether his height was a benefit or a handicap to John Hayes.

“I wouldn’t call it a handicap and nowadays there are fellas just as tall as me,” he said.

“As for opponents, the short guys and the tall guys present you with different kinds of problems and learning to adapt comes with experience.

“A small fella is going to be difficult because he’s so low, the tall guy will like to keep the scrums up, so you have to find ways of getting the upperhand.

“The scrum is first and foremost from a prop’s point of view. You have to have a good scrum to launch a quality back line like Munster’s.

“But as soon as that is over, you have to switch on to the next mode, it’s not a case of waiting for the next scrum. We have to get on the road and be ready for what happens next.

Lifting in the line-out originally meant guaranteed possession but that has also changed. Defences are lifting as well and it’s nearly as difficult to win possession as it was before lifting came in.”

Hayes was desperately unlucky not to claim a place on the Lions team touring Australia in 2000 but that situation will surely be rectified in New Zealand in 2004.

Alan Gaffney certainly believes Hayes’s rate of progress points very definitely in that direction.

“Apart from the set pieces, he is a very skilful player,” says the Aussie. “John has to be one of the best line-out lifters in the game and Tony Darcy, the Irish scrummaging coach, has told me himself that he regards John as one of the best scrummagers in the world.”

That being the case, you are left to wonder just how much more a man who only took up the game at the age of 19 can achieve.

Coaches such as Gaffney, Kidney and Eddie O’Sullivan are making more and more use of his particular talents and the result has been a series of memorable open field bursts culminating in three crucial Munster tries.

The first was the memorable game breaker against Toulouse in 2000 followed by another against Perpignan at Thomond Park in November and the latest last week against Ulster.

Typically, he gives most of the credit for that score to Ronan O’Gara. “He drew in a few players,” he says. He omits to mention however, that it all happened so quickly he had to work off a standing start and needed to use his strength and balance to drag and pull a host of would-be tacklers the nine or 10 metres that still needed to be covered.

He also had to use the full length of his left arm to reach his objective while keeping the ball safely in his possession.

Bragging and boasting are not part of John Hayes’s make-up.

He’s a man of the soil, the proud son of farming stock from Cappamore where you daren’t get too far ahead of yourself.

As for his well-documented scrummaging shortcomings: “You just have to work on it like a player in any position, a scrum-half with his passing, a hooker with his throwing, an out-half with his kicking. Paul McCarthy came in for this season to work on our scrum and it’s great to have a specialist

“Tony Darcy helps me with Ireland and before that I had help from Niall O’Donovan while having Claw (Peter Clohessy) around was like having another coach Hayes is making no promises about today’s game. As always, he wants to do it for the Munster fans, whom he believes are due a huge amount of credit for the team’s success.

You just know John Hayes and his team-mates won’t fail for want of effort.