Opportunity knocks for Kearney
As a fresh-faced 19-year-old, having just absorbed his Leaving Certificate results, Leinster coach Michael Cheika plunged him into the deep end in a pre-season friendly with Overmach Parma in Naas. A hat-trick of tries from the Louth man against the Italians lifted the gloom on a drab affair and the performance was his passport to the professional ranks.
However there have been set backs, injuries, dips in form and only this week will he will claim his first Six Nations start, away to France on Saturday.
It’s hard to believe that the wing-cum-fullback is just 21-years-old having packed so much into a short but exciting career.
Born in Dundalk, he shone not just at rugby but in soccer and GAA. Cooley Kickhams helped nurture that cultured left boot in a burgeoning GAA career that saw him win a place on the Louth minor football team. But rugby took a grip from a young age, especially when he followed in the footsteps of his father, David, and brother, Richard, in attending Kildare rugby nursery, Clongowes Wood College.
Soon he was catching the eye of representative selectors and became one of the young bucks who has made that seamless transition from school to pro-ranks — Luke Fitzgerald being the other — and while the Leinster ‘galacticos’ appear immovable at times, there always appears to be a keen competition between the duo to break onto the first XV.
However, the retirement of Denis Hickie has freed up a position and makes it a case of either one or the other to make the side.
But looking back, it seems everything happened too quickly for Kearney in his first full season (2005-06) with Leinster. Even in early 2005, then Blues coach, Declan Kidney, invited the then 18-year-old to a few senior sessions and by November he was in Ireland senior camp with Eddie O’Sullivan. The week leading to his full Irish debut against Argentina in Buenos Aires last summer, he admitted that he found his second season more beneficial in terms of learning the hard way.
“It taught me so much about how to cope and how to get there, whereas in my first season everything just kept going up and up. It was great at the time, but you get your setbacks. You learn a lot from it.”
Hamstring problems and poor form saw him bracketed in the second-season syndrome category, and his promising career hit a new low against Munster in Thomond Park in December ‘06. But Cheika believed in him and in the following spring he got his chances to redeem himself. He did so in swashbuckling style in the Magners League and was rewarded with a plane ticket to Argentina.
Denis Hickie’s retirement has also offered him a chance to make the left wing his own at Leinster and his booming left boot has proved a huge asset for province and, lately, country. His transition from boy to man looked complete at GAA headquarters last weekend when he showed exceptional maturity upon his introduction on the left wing. Ireland captain, Brian O’Driscoll, says that by learning his trade with Leinster, Kearney has become a smarter rugby player.
“He’s really played extremely well this year,” says O’Driscoll. “He’s played a lot smarter and made far less mistakes. I think he’s learning a huge amount. Sometimes it’s difficult when you’re coming out of school, you’re the cream of the crop, and to be thrown into a situation where you’re playing with guys a lot older than you it’s sometimes difficult to take on board what they have to say. But he’s very good at listening to little bits of advice that different people give to him. He thoroughly deserves his opportunity on the wing.”
Kearney himself is quite reflective on what has gone before. “I think that’s something that comes over time,” says the 2005 Irish Examiner Junior Sports Star winner. “In your first season and probably into your second season, you’re seen a bit more as a kid where mistakes and things are accepted. In my third season now (in pro level) you have to approach the game more maturely and more consistently. I think I’ve achieved that this season.”
Another goal he has achieved is a starting place on Ireland’s XV for the Six Nations, no easy feat especially in a set-up which shows a reluctance to blood “youngsters”.
“Making the first team was always there at the back of my mind, but I don’t set my goals as specific as that. At the start of the season my two main goals were to develop a new consistency and improve my defence.
“I think I’ve achieved that somewhat. It will need a lot more improvement. If you can achieve those goals then they may bring you further on down the line and create other opportunities.”
The word opportunities pops up again — Kearney more than anyone knows how to take them.
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