The Big Interview: Shane Jennings hits hard — on and off the field
hange. It’s something Shane Jennings knows a lot about.
Johnny Sexton and Brian O’Driscoll will tell you, it was Jennings and Leo Cullen that were the main instigators and enforcers of the standards that transformed Leinster from supposed ladyboys of Europe into three-times champions of the place.
Sexton could also see in Jennings’ last couple of years that the province was changing and possibly not for the better.
Now Ireland need to change, and though he’s no longer part of that setup, Jennings has ideas how.
The last time you probably saw him was on your TV screens during the World Cup, providing measured, sober analysis while the rest of us were giddy throughout the pool stages only to come crashing down to earth with the Argentina game.
Now a lot of us see only dark days ahead for Irish rugby.
The future is bleak. To borrow a term from his new-day job that is the property business, the bubble has burst.
That’s not how Jennings sees it. For sure there could be some growing pains. New players will need time. But just as importantly, as he sees it, Ireland need to play a new kind of game. If they do, bright days will follow.
“I’d just love our mindset and attitude to go ‘Wait a minute, we’re not the biggest team. Why are we going into collisions when we don’t need to? Let’s be a bit more creative and have an appreciation for space.’
“I know whenever I played, I was as happy as Larry when someone ran at me. I’d be bricking myself if I saw some fella a bit further away from me who had good feet and the option to put a bit of a step on me.
“I genuinely think we have a talented group of players that are capable of playing that kind of game. I don’t know what it’s like in camp, I don’t know what they’re being told, but you would hope that they realise we need to change. Because the World Cup showed we need to change. It didn’t work. If we want to get to World Cup semi-finals, if we want to win more Six Nations championships, I don’t think what we’ve done in the past will get us over the line. Because other teams have changed. The opposition coaching has changed.”
He’s still not sure what France will be like with Guy Noves; only that he has a ridiculous level of talent to work with, especially that powerful pack. But England he can safely predict will be a completely different animal under Eddie Jones.
“You’ll see they’ll have a better appreciation for space. English people have traditionally thought ‘We’re bigger than you, so we’re just going to kick lumps out of you, we’re going to roll over you.’ But now they’ll use players like Jonathon Joseph who can play with the ball an awful lot better.”
And that’s why Jennings can see a change in coaching emphasis with Ireland as well. Inheriting the job in the middle of a World Cup cycle, Joe Schmidt opted not to implement the passing, offloading game he instilled so brilliantly at Leinster. Now he might.
Sometimes Jennings wonders that in the past Schmidt’s attention to detail could be perceived to be so demanding by players, they’ve shirked away from playing a more expansive game — and their own responsibilities. They need to get over that, he maintains, pointing to how Argentina threw the ball around in Cardiff in a manner they couldn’t a few years earlier.
“Players can say ‘Oh Joe’s detail is so complicated.’ It’s not! Players need to take a step back like the best players do and realise there are certain power plays that he wants where the skill level has to be right on the money, but for that skill level to be on the money, you have to practise.”
It’ll be a wiser Irish coaching staff this year, he sees. Simon Easterby is now 18 months into his role as forwards coach; he should be a lot more comfortable and assertive this season.
Also, as Jennings points out, Schmidt had only experienced one international tour before the World Cup: the difficulty Ireland had trying to get back to the intensity level of the France game showed even Schmidt had to learn a lot about a tour environment.
What has to be a given in the Six Nations though is the effort and commitment levels. Has he seen that slip in the provinces since the World Cup? Yeah, a bit. He’s seen standards slip in Leinster. He could see it in his last few years there.
“Listen, the whole dynamic of a place moves on,” says Jennings. “When you’re the young guy, you come in and keep your head down. Then you develop a core group of friends that you bond with over a number of years and you have success. Then the next generation comes in and you don’t always see eye to eye with them. That’s just a fact of life. They’re just a different beast.”
He knows how it is to have things a little bit too easy. He’ll be the first to admit that it took heading off to Leicester with Leo Cullen in the autumn of 2005 for him “to grow up and cop on a bit”.
He had been living at home with his mother Joan and his stepfather. He didn’t have to worry about washing his clothes or cooking his own dinner; it was all laid on for him. Until he went to Leicester and mixed with men who were used to living away from home since their teens.
There was a harder edge to them at everything. The intensity at training on a Monday was as high as it would be during a game at the weekend. And it didn’t matter where you’d played that weekend. He’d see Martin Corry play a Six Nations game for England and if they didn’t have a match for another fortnight, Corry would report to Leicester on the Monday morning and bang into Jennings like as if it was England against Ireland.
Jennings would bring that mindset to Leinster upon his return. Sexton has described him and Cullen as the “standard-setters”, leaders both vocally and by example.
Cullen as a player was renowned for not tolerating any waffle in the Leinster dressing room but he allowed Jennings and Sexton greater latitude and airtime. “Everyone likes to hear them talking,” he’d write in A Captain’s Story. Because invariably they’d back it up.
Think back to that first Heineken Cup final win in 2009. At half-time Leinster trailed Jennings’ old club Leicester by seven points. Then came a try from Jamie Heaslip. Who was pushing him forward with a massive leg drive? Jennings, with, as Brian O’Driscoll would put it in his book, “a phenomenal piece of support play”.
Their second Heineken Cup final in 2011, they famously trailed by Northampton by 16 points at half-time. Then they brought on Jennings at openside flanker, a move that O’Driscoll would claim “worked brilliantly”.
For their third triumph, in 2012, Cullen would make a point of bringing Jennings up to lift the Cup with him. To O’Driscoll it was hugely symbolic, “the boys who came from Leicester and helped to raise the bar for us all” being the ones to raise the cup.
How did they do it? “If you’re going to talk about being the most skilful team or the fittest team, you’ve got to show that in your stats,” Jennings maintains.
“Every Monday I’d look at the stats and see if I had the highest tackle count or if I had the most rucks or if I ran the most kilometres in the game. In every fitness test I wanted to be at the top. So if was harping on about how we were still not fit enough or we weren’t getting down to the breakdown because we were fatiguing, I’d to back it up so fellas could say ‘In fairness, he’s doing his job.’
“You had guys like Jamie [Heaslip] and Sean [O’Brien] who were top of the carries. That was their goal, their role. My job was to tackle and hit as many rucks as I could to recycle the ball to get the ball to those guys. Leo’s job was to make sure that he ran the lineout. We tried to instil that responsibility with everybody so you could be held accountable for your actions. And if someone wasn’t pulling their weight, you could call them out. And it wasn’t about belittling anybody. I’ve been called out.
“One of the best things that ever happened to me in Leicester was when I was dropped after a quarter-final against Bath. I went up to [Richard] Cockerill and said ‘Right, what do I need to sort out for next week?’ And he was kind of humming and hawing when Paddy Howard walked by and said ‘It wasn’t him who dropped you. I dropped you. You didn’t play well. In fact, you played shite! You need to sort out x, y and z and if you do, you might get an opportunity again. But while you’ve been playing shite, we’ve had another guy there who has been training really well, he’s really good and he’s going to get a chance now. You’ve got to make sure now that you’re hungry whenever your chance comes around again.’”
In Leinster, he finds that same grit has been diluted. In a way it’s partly his fault. He and Cullen upon their return from winning a Premiership with Leicester would push for an upgrade of Leinster’s facilities; it was no coincidence that they won their first Heineken Cup the same year that they could all change in the one dressing room. But over the years as the facilities further improved, something may have been lost.
“It’s a challenge for the new group to get an appreciation of what it actually took to be successful. When I came in at the start, I was changing out of my mum’s Volkswagen Polo in Old Belvedere with Victor Costello and these guys. So we knew the dark days and the work that had to be put in, not just by us but the whole organisation to get to where Leinster is now with a couple of million euro facilities in UCD.
“But the fellas now coming into that, there’s a part of them with all this being lined on for them that has to be thinking, ‘This is kind of easy.’ I don’t know if they have that same appreciation of what it takes. Now, some do. But some don’t.
“That’s natural. To maintain a level of success year on year in any sport is very hard to do. It’s easy to get a bit soft and slip into a comfort zone. Whereas we had a cause that stimulated our success. We were watching Munster winning and fellas calling us a bunch of pansies in the paper. And as much as people could say ‘Ah, Franno [Neil Francis] is only being an eejit’, it hurt! And that drove us. But that sense of cause and grievance is not sustainable. And for a young fella to come into a setup that has been regularly winning in Europe and Pro12 titles, they can lose that ethos.”
He can see Cullen as head coach turning it around; it’ll just take time, like it did for Cheika. But it’s fair to say that since Jennings retired last May, he’s been faring better without rugby and Leinster than Leinster has been faring without him.
He’s still on good terms with Leinster. They offered him a figure and a role to stay within the organisation but it didn’t match what he’d envisaged. He had long prepared for a career outside the game. He studied for an MBA in Dublin Business School, along with teammates like Eoin O’Malley, Rob Kearney, Fionn Carr and Isaac Boss.
Two years ago he started a placement and mentorship through IRUPA, the players’ representative body. Last summer he started working full-time with Sherry FitzGerald as a director of business development.
“I consider myself very lucky. There’s an awful lot of goodwill in Ireland for rugby players, especially when you’re coming to the end of your career, that can open up doors. And a big part of the reason I feel good is because I went out on my own terms.
“Last year alright was a complete pain in the arse. I tore a hamstring for the first time in a 15-year-career and 18 weeks later I still wasn’t able to play. But for the most part I was happy with what I had achieved in rugby. I feel very content that I had a positive influence on the place [Leinster] and made great friends.”
Another big change has been the arrival of Sara five months ago. Again, it’s been for the better.
“I wish we [he and wife Clíona] had done it earlier. It opens your eyes to the important things in life. When you’re in professional sport you can become consumed by it. And for a period of time if you want to be successful it has to be everything. I think everyone in Leinster needed to be like that at a certain point in their career. But it shouldn’t always be the sole focus. The lads who had kids probably understood that a bit better than we did.”
What they all understood was as Sexton put it his word was law. They could still do with listening to him.
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