BIG MATCH DIET? Coffee and autographs
BY the time the smallest boy got to the top of the queue, in the bar of a Cork hotel, he’d realised his mistake. A basic planning error, but it jeopardised the entire mission.
“Sorry,” he said, “I’ve no paper.”
“That’s okay,” said Tomás O’Leary, who’d been signing autographs. “I’ll be here.”
And the boy sprinted off for something – anything – that would accommodate a signature.
His quarry filled out another coffee. The week of a big game, what else is there to do? The days stretch out to Sunday, and a Heineken Cup semi-final with Biarritz, so the Munster scrum-half and his colleagues cast around for ways to kill the time.
“Obviously the week is busy enough with training,” he says. “Most days you’re only training three hours at most, though, you couldn’t do much more. The week of a big game you’re doing a fair amount of video analysis as well. As to what you do with the rest of the time, the free time . . .
“I’d be lazy enough. Sit around and watch TV. Meet the lads for coffee. Or lunch, maybe.”
Hmm. Food. In this correspondent’s last encounter with a Munster player a tiny biscuit, which accompanied a coffee, became involved in a tug of love – or rather a swipe of love – which Jerry Flannery, competitive professional athlete though he may be, lost hands down.
O’Leary’s coffee is unaccompanied by confectionery.
“I wouldn’t be that anal about that side of things,” he says. “You can’t indulge in everything but it wouldn’t bother me to have a bar or a few biscuits either. It wouldn’t affect me and we train a lot anyway. You’ve to put plenty of calories into your body, so long as they’re good calories, but you’re entitled to your indulgences. You have to live as well.
“It’s not like we’re boxers trying to make weight. I’m not that strict that I’d cut out butter, say, but you have to eat well at the same time.”
Any recommendations?
“The chow mein in Wagamama is good. So is the chicken katsu curry. Or the salmon teriyaki.” Fair enough, that’s lunch taken care of on the week of a big game. What about the evenings? “I’d take it easy, probably sit and vegetate in front of the TV.”
Ah, Eastenders? The travails of Syed and Christian? “No, I’m not that into the soaps at all.”
What about the box set of DVDs then, a basic ingredient in just about any interaction between a professional rugby player and a journalist these days? O’Leary gives the answer of a seasoned tourist.
“I wouldn’t be into the box sets at home, but if you were away for a few weeks you’d get into whatever you’d have on your laptop. I was big into Entourage for a while, Johnny Drama and so on.
“I have The Wire box set at home, though, my mother got it for me for Christmas.”
The Wire? Now you’re talking. Who’s the better dresser, Lester or Bunk? Or Daniels, maybe? “I’ve only watched one or two of the episodes so far. The lads are telling me it’s slow to start but that it’s good once you get into it. I’m more into The Office. And Only Fools and Horses at the moment.”
Old school. Not bad.
IT’S HARDLY surprising if O’Leary lacks an appetite for pretend horrors in DVD dramas. A nightmare ankle injury ruled him out of the Lions tour last summer, as well as the Heineken Cup semi-final.
“The moment it happened I knew it was bad,” he says. “I looked down and the foot was hanging on by the sock, basically. The instant thought was ‘I’m going to miss the Heineken Cup semi-final and the Lions’. Feeling sorry for myself already.
“It was a tough few weeks. Once the rehab started you could set goals, to be back playing Heineken Cup this season and so on, and that’s good, but for the few weeks after the surgery I could do nothing. Basically lying in bed feeling sorry for myself. That’s human nature, though you’d be aware there are people worse off than yourself. But that’s professional rugby, you’re going to have serious injuries.”
Ten minutes against Llanelli was O’Leary’s re-introduction to the game; the following week he started against the Dragons, and by the time the Six Nations rolled around, the injury was a distant memory. Now the challenge is to create some new memories. When the time to kick-off can be measured in hours rather than days, the heat comes on.
“It gets fairly intense. I won’t say it never gets to me. It does. The last couple of days the training is done, you’re sitting in a hotel. Waiting. All the lads are the same, everyone stuck in a hotel. There’s not a lot to entertain you, especially if you’re overseas. It’s boring, everyone’s thoughts are dominated by the game, and even if you try to tune out, you go back to thinking about the game.
“It’s a privilege to be there, but at the same time it’s not something you can enjoy until afterwards.”
The way O’Leary puts it, there’s a contradiction involved in the countdown to a big game: you know what’s on the way, but at the same time you don’t know what exactly you can expect.
“It’s difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t been through it,” he says. “There’s always the sense of what’s coming, but at the same time there’s the unknown – you don’t know if you’re going to perform or not. And that’s difficult, but it’s also where you want to be. Not everyone is going around with a white face in the dressing room, though some lads get very quiet alright. After a while you can sense when another player is very tense.
“But you can use that, too – you can use that to heighten your own awareness and you can get more tuned in mentally and ready for the game.”
The Game. Biarritz probably feel they owe Munster one after the 2006 Heineken Cup final. “We’re going over there confident, obviously, that we can win it. We’re looking forward to it, though clearly it’s going to be a big challenge. I didn’t play when Munster played there a few years ago, but it looks a tough place to go and get a result. Yeah, looking forward to it now.”
Looking forward to it a bit more now that the airports are sorted, no doubt, rather than facing an odyssey like Liverpool in the Europa Cup. “Thank God all that’s sorted out. You’d be looking forward to the game but the last few weeks you’d be thinking ‘how are we going to get over there’, you could do without a trip like that (Liverpool’s).”
The autograph hunter comes back equipped with the essentials any autograph hunter needs, and he gets the signature he wants.
“Hope you play well,” says the boy.
“Thanks,” says O’Leary. “Hopefully we’ll do okay.”
Coffee and autographs.
It’s the week of a big game. What else is there to do?
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