O’Gara speaks out over slurs on personal life

RONAN O’GARA attempted his toughest conversion of the Rugby World Cup yet at the weekend — trying to convince the world’s media that rumours about his personal life were untrue.

The off-form out-halffinally grabbed the topic with both hands and ran with it after several days of trying to achieve the physiological impossibility of simultaneously keeping his chin up and head down.

O’Gara, who got Ireland’s only score in the team’s dismal performance against France in last Friday’s crunch match, evidently felt there was nothing left to lose by tackling the subject head-on.

First he addressed those gambling rumours, the ones that had him so fond of a flutter that he would happily bet not even on two flies crawling up a wall, but on one fly beating his personal best for wall-crawling.

“The gambling affront doesn’t bother me because I’ll say it straight up. I do back horses and do it frequently. I own racehorses and have placed bets since I was 18,” he said, referring to the reports in L’Equipe.

Having neatly drop-kicked that one into the stratosphere, O’Gara then moved on to the more hurtful rumours centring on his relationship with his childhood sweetheart Jessica, whom he married just last year.

“Despicable, rubbish and disappointing,” was how he described the reports.

“It’s been despicable really — talk about disputes in your marriage and being told you’ve been kicked out of your own home are the lowest of the low,” said the 30-year-old Corkman.

“Like everybody else, little things happen, but that’s behind closed doors at home. I love my wife and I hope she loves me and that’s all I’ll say.”

Unfortunately for Rog, the nightclub photographs which seem to have sparked much of the rumour by showing him in a state of revelry were still the most downloaded images of any web pages bearing his name in a Google search yesterday.

Still O’Gara said he was glad the rumours had finally been brought into open.

His teammates continued to rally around him, with Jerry Flannery declaring the treatment of his colleague as “appalling” and Donnacha O’Callaghan saying he had proved his resilience on and off the pitch.

If such battle talk and teamwork continues this week, Argentina might have something to worry about come Sunday. Otherwise it really will be a last tango in Paris with a once splendid orchestra badly out of key.