O’Gara keeping cool head again

TO OPERATE in the cockpit of one of the best club rugby teams in professional rugby, the pivotal out-half position, you need to have a computer for a brain, and a rapid-fire computer at that, one with several gigabytes of RAM.

So many critical decisions to be made in the course of a game, usually with mere milliseconds in which to evaluate all the options and mere millimetres in which to operate, before the hit comes. In close games, on those decisions will rest the fate of the team. Well, for many, many years now, in the blood red of Munster, Ronan O’Gara has proved himself one of the best there is at pure game control, one of the best, perhaps, there ever has been, a master general. As if that isn’t demanding enough in its own right, however, there is more to being a top out-half than decision-making; there is also the art of goal-kicking, another crucial element in any close game. And here again, over the last decade and more, O’Gara has proven himself among the best. Just a few months ago, however, at the start of the 2009/10 season, came a glitch. First in one match, then – worryingly for the legions of Munster fans – in the next, and then, more worryingly again, in the next. The radar was off, and the pressure was on. In debating halls great and small, from barstools to TV studio armchairs, questions were being asked, theories forwarded as to what was gone wrong. Even as Jonny Sexton of Leinster, Ronan’s current rival for the Ireland number 10 shirt, was hitting the high notes, however, and just as he would in the white heat of battle, the man himself remained cool, calculating, that computer brain absorbing the data, and analysing, analysing. “I was asking myself the same questions ye were asking,” he admits, “But eventually it got to the stage where I was able to break things down and I knew where I was, and hopefully now going forward I’ve learned from that. I’ve had periods like that over the last 10 years and you have to face them head-on, and this was another challenge in my career.

“I’m constantly changing, constantly looking for improvements and constantly trying to be the best, trying to make it as simple as possible. How I broke down my season was the first three games I viewed as warm-up games. They were Celtic (Magners) League games, and maybe I didn’t give them the respect they deserved, but they were my first three games, and I wasn’t putting myself under any pressure. I had had 12 weeks off, I didn’t do much kicking, I felt I didn’t need to.”