John Ryan an overnight success six seasons in the making
A year ago, both were merely finding their feet, the tighthead prop beginning to cement his position as the starting number three just as Anthony Foley’s side were emerging from their terrible run and getting their act together for one last, desperate push for Champions Cup qualification.
It all seems a very long time ago as Munster under the guidance of Rassie Erasmus and driven by the memory of the late Foley have powered into the semis of both the European competition and the Guinness PRO12 while Ryan, 28, now has six Ireland caps to his name and is the rock of his province’s scrum.
Yet the struggles have not been forgotten and today’s clash with defending champions Saracens at the Aviva Stadium represents another massive test of just how far this group of players has come.
“How many games have we won at this stage?” Ryan asks rhetorically in an interview with the Irish Examiner this week.
“I think it’s 17 in the league. We’ve lost to Cardiff, Leinster and Scarlets, and Leicester in Europe, so that’s six Champions Cup wins. Turn it around and look at last year, there wasn’t that competitive nature there, it developed towards the end of the season because we needed it to get into Europe for this year.
“We got into Europe by the skin of our teeth, came through (the pool) as second seeds and now we’re sitting here looking forward to playing against the best club team, you could debate it, in world rugby.
“They’re an incredibly drilled team. There’s a lot of England boys in there and without a shadow of a doubt, we’re the underdogs.
"Everyone says Munster love that underdog tag but we have a director of rugby who doesn’t believe in being an underdog. He believes in 15 against 15 and whoever has the better game on the day will win.
"He breaks it down that simply and it’s a 50-50 chance of winning this weekend, that’s the way we’re looking at it. We’re not going to build them up, we’re not going to knock them down.
"We’ve got the gameplan we’re going to play with and we’re not going to change anything, that’s our mindset for this weekend.”
Ryan’s forthright mindset matches his play this season as he has come of age in the Munster front row.
To some it might look like an overnight success but the Corkman made his senior debut for his province six seasons ago when Tony McGahan was head coach and has had to bide his time, flip-flopping between loosehead and tighthead and dealing with the effects of ulcerative colitis, which played havoc with his weight and kept him out of the selection picture for much of 2014 as he sought ways to manage the condition.
“I feel like my career’s kind of been split in two. My first game was September 2011, which is a long time ago, and I steadily got more and more appearances and it wasn’t the progress, like, some people just fly onto the scene and that’s it, they’re there, they’ve made it and it’s great, but for me it was a longer road.
“There were those hiccups along the road with health issues but I kind of closed the book on that halfway through last season. I was getting a good few starts and it was all going well because it was tighthead all the way for me from then.
“This year it feels as if it’s a new chapter again. I’m starting, I’ve got a good bit of confidence, things are going well for me. I’ve got a good bit of work to do still to become a complete player and I’m going to get a few backward steps in the future but that’s what everybody gets.
“I’m far from the finished article and I’m looking to keep progressing. I’ve another two years at Munster so... I’m 28, it’s not that young and as I say, it’s been a long road but I wouldn’t regret anything and I wouldn’t change much, to be honest.
“I couldn’t help what happened but I am where I am today and I’m going to be playing in a good place on the weekend.
“It’s all positive and all I can do now is take everything that’s happened and learn from it, keep going and try and become a better player again.”
The last meeting with Saracens, a 33-10 pool defeat in January 2015, came in that ‘before’ section of his career path and, accordingly, saw Ryan come off the bench as loosehead cover following a yellow card for James Cronin.
“Nothing went right,” Ryan recalled.
“We did not turn up on the day and they were bloody ruthless and they put up a big score on us.
“It’s not a motivation. Our motivation is coming where we came from last year and the improvement we’ve made.
“It’s a huge improvement from where we were last year and the motivation is to keep building on that.
“There’s no point in going from not even progressing out of our pool last year and scraping into Europe this year and then finishing where we did in the pool stages only to get to here and say ‘aww, we’ve got to a semi-final, that’s excellent’.
“We want to win the final, we want to be winning the cup. That’s a given with all teams in the semi-finals but I suppose more so with us we feel we have a point to prove. There’s the emotional side of it with Axel, too, but there’s a lot of factors in it. We’re here to win, not just to take part.
“Axel is still in the forefront of our minds but there’s only so much... that Glasgow game (the day after Foley’s funeral) was massively emotional and that carried on for I don’t know how many games which we won but it carried on for a good bit. That can only go so far.
“Now what we’re trying to do is play the same game plan we always played with him and just do it in a more clinical fashion, play in the right areas.
"He’d always say ‘play in the right areas’ and that’s what we’re going to do. We’ll play the game he wanted to play and we’ll do it to the best of our ability.”
So far that has been more than good enough, and so too for Ryan, whose rise has been recognised by Ireland boss Joe Schmidt, who handed the prop his Test debut against Canada last November and then installed the Munster front-rower as Tadhg Furlong’s Six Nations deputy, replacing the Leinster Lion off the bench in all five matches. It has crowned quite the campaign for Ryan but he insisted now is not the moment to look back.
“It’s been a great year and there are slight moments when I let myself think, ‘ah, God, things are going well at the moment’, but then I snap out of it immediately.
"Our season isn’t finished and I don’t want to think about the season so far. It’s been great for me personally and I’m very happy with it but we’re not finished yet and there’s more to go and I want to achieve more before I fully reflect on everything.”
With Furlong selected by the British & Irish Lions, Ryan is hoping a call comes from Schmidt to tour the USA and Japan this June.
“Fingers crossed. I’ve probably had to fight hard enough. This is my first season starting more or less because any previous time I started was because BJ was injured or Archer was injured.
"People might think it’s happened quickly for me but I’ve been playing five years before that as well, between tighthead and loosehead, so it’s all been building up to this year and hopefully I can carry it on for another few seasons and keep it going and maybe stick it out for another few seasons after that. Then I’ll reflect.”
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