KIERAN SHANNON: Why O’Connell will respect Schmidt’s remarks

Schmidt was seeing a bigger picture, the game itself, and the importance parents feel that it is a game safe enough for their kids to play.

When it came to the Leinster supporters, Joe Schmidt got off to a shaky enough start. In three of his first four games in charge, the team lost. Some of those defeats were more than losses. Treviso pummelled them. So did Leicester in a pre-season game. While there was an appreciation that it was early days, there was also a fear that the team Michael Cheika had built had been handed over to the wrong pair of hands.

With the players it was different. They liked and respected him from the start. His methods. His philosophy.

His questions.

Leo Cullen remembers his first time sitting down with his new coach and being rocked back in his chair by the Kiwi’s quiet directness.

“So, Leo, what are you going to bring to the team this season?”

Yesterday was history. What were you going to do for him now and in the near future? A clean slate as well as a new sheriff was in town.

Every player was fired reflective, probing questions but one in particular stood out to Cullen when he penned the book ‘A Captain’s Story’ about Leinster’s first season under Schmidt.

A team-mate, a fellow forward, was hit right between the eyes with the beauty: “So, if Paul O’Connell saw you walking down the street, what do you reckon he’d be thinking about you?”

One word underpinned why Schmidt included O’Connell in such a question. Respect. O’Connell was someone that Schmidt clearly respected and the player assumedly respected too. Above all, O’Connell was someone that his player would want to be respected by. But was he? Questions and personalities don’t come more searching and daunting for a sportsperson: do you think someone as fair-minded and tough-minded as Paul O’Connell would respect you? Last week in his various comments about the incident which left Dave Kearney hospitalised and Paul O’Connell free to play against Schmidt’s old club Clermont this weekend, Schmidt stressed again that respect he had for O’Connell; it was the process and the act he was criticising, not the man and the player.

But as he did so, this column couldn’t help but think of asking Schmidt the question that he asked that Leinster player a few years ago: “So, if Paul O’Connell saw you walking down the street, what do you reckon he’d be thinking about you?”

It’s a measure of both men that we suspect that the respect Schmidt has for O’Connell is mutual, and all the more so for how Schmidt conducted himself last week.

It wouldn’t have been lost on O’Connell that a more politically-conscious and less-principled coach in contention for the Irish head coach vacancy would have avoided any hint of criticism of O’Connell.

This is Ireland. Tribalism defines and sometimes smears our sport. Attack one of ours, especially one of our gods, and you are the enemy.

You’ll recall the furore that surrounded Anthony Tohill’s comments on The Sunday Game back in 2010 after another Paul Galvin-Eoin Cadogan face-off in another heated Cork-Kerry game. Though Tohill qualified his comments by stressing his respect for Galvin the footballer, he was accused by Kingdom folk of playing the man and not the ball andjeopardising his future relations as Irish International Rules coach with Kerry players later that year.

If there’s one rivalry in Irish sport that now approaches, even eclipses, Cork-Kerry in terms of stature and regularity and an increasingly surprising bitterness, it’s Munster-Leinster. The O’Connell-Kearney incident added further fuel to that fire and by commenting on the incident, Schmidt could have too.

He didn’t, which is a measure of how exquisite his choice of words and tone was last week. There wasn’t a hint of bluster, just the right level of indignation and a perfect and complete display of dignity.

Although he was defending one of his own, reminding us all there was a victim in this crime and it wasn’t Paul O’Connell, Schmidt was seeing a bigger picture, the game itself, and the importance that parents feel it is a game safe enough for their kids to play.

In challenging O’Connell and not being afraid to offend O’Connell, he would have hugely impressed O’Connell.

This column has written before about how no player in Irish sport carries himself as well off the field as well as on it as Paul O’Connell, how he’s the kind who’ll remain in the line of a big queue outside a Limerick nightclub when the bouncers are only wanting to usher him and his VIP status straight through the door.

He’d have the self-confidence and self-awareness to recognise that Schmidt’s criticisms weren’t any assault on his character but fair comment in good taste with great conviction.

An intelligent, values-driven player like O’Connell wants to be coached by an intelligent, values-driven coach like Schmidt. Their humility is part of what makes them so good.

We can only hope that in the coming days the IRFU has the good sense to let them team up together in green.

In possibly risking the job, Schmidt showed just why he’s the right man for the job — and to coach O’Connell.