O’Callaghan: I’ve never been fitter
What was revealed is the other Donncha; the squad prankster. The man who (in)famously pulled down Alastair Campbell’s tracksuit pants in public on the 2005 Lions tour, and who is known to have tied a reporters’ shoelaces in mid-interview.
All joking aside, O’Callaghan says he has never felt in better shape after a pre-season that included two trips to Spala in Poland, the Olympic training camp 90 minutes south of Warsaw and home to various Ireland rugby squads during 19 visits over the last six years. If the word ‘camp’ suggests all fun and games think again, though if you’re Donncha O’Callaghan there is always the funnier side — especially his description of Spala’s centrepiece, the blue cryochamber built seven years ago and visited annually by 6000 athletes.
The chamber, what’s it like? ‘‘It depends on the fellows you are in there with!” grins O’Callaghan. “If you’re in with (John) Hayes it can be incredible smelly, if you’re in with (Peter) Stringer it can be incredibly roomy and actually enjoyable but you’ve got to be very selective who you go into cryotherapy with. I prefer sticking with (Denis) Leamy — he just wants to get in and out.”
He continues in a jocular vein: “You get an oul pair of socks, a pair of boxers, head band and face mask. You go in with five. Or six when Stringer is around! It’s minus 140, you stand in there for three minutes, they tell us if you did eight minutes you’d die. In essence it’s like the ice baths only multiplied by 90.
“There are a few games we play, whatever keeps your mind off it. It’s grand for the first minute or so but, after a while, the backs of your knees start hurting. When you come out of it, you tip away on the bike for ten minutes or do stretches. You always get a few good looking guys taking Ab sessions. So I might fall in with John Hayes for Abs!”
But colourful descriptions aside, O’Callaghan can point to the chambers benefits. “At the start of the week you’re kinda saying ‘this is a load of balls, this couldn’t work’. Come the end of it, when you come through the amount of training you’ve done, you feel the benefits from it; you just couldn’t get through the amount of workload we’ve been getting through and still holding up to go out the next day and do the same type of training.”
The seven weeks of conditioning are now over and the whole Ireland training squad reassembles in Limerick on Monday for the final countdown to ‘Le Coupe du Monde’. With only 44 days left to the beginning of the World Cup, O’Callaghan is one, like Paul O’Connell and Ronan O’Gara, who feels Ireland can win the tournament. He even looks back to his experience at the 2003 World Cup in Australia, a younger player who didn’t seem to see the bigger picture then. “To be honest, you only get one shot at something like this. I was lucky to be a squad player in the last World Cup. I probably didn’t appreciate it as much as I should have. I remember Woody out there — he was so hungry, so committed. If I was to be honest I wasn’t in that same mind frame; I was glad to be in the squad, glad to be in the 30, delighted to be in the 22. Whereas he (Woody) was there to win it. I think now four years on, it’s a kinda reverse. I’m used to winning big matches, used to winning big competitions.
‘‘To be honest if we said we were going to do anything less than win the tournament, we’re wasting our time. You look at the squad of players we have, we’ve reached a maturity in the squad that fellows expect to win big games.
“I think fellows are at an age where we see it as maybe this could be our last chance of doing something big and, to be honest, you don’t want to be remembered as a nearly man — nearly winning a Grand Slam and stuff like that.
“You just know there’s a mindset in this squad since we’ve met up — even in pre-conditioning — there’s a mindset that this is different this year. You’ve really got to bring you’re best game to be ready to perform.”
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