Patience required but Rónan Kelleher's path to Ireland's front row is clear

HOOKED: Rónan Kelleher played Gaelic football, tennis and basketball and also played in different positions in rugby, lending a dynamism that he brings to the position of hooker. Picture: Dan Sheridan

Nature or nurture. It’s a debate so old it may even predate Campbell-Ward and it is every bit as intractable.

Rónan Kelleher clearly has sport in the blood. His father Tim was a hurler in a bygone age back in Cork and elder brother Cian is part of the same Leinster dressing-room. That’s a decent head start but environment has watered these seeds to huge effect.

The Kelleher boys grew up in an area flush with kids of the same mind. Among them was Rory O’Loughlin, another current Leinster player, who lived across the road. Their playground was Monkstown Rugby Club and it lay no more than a 100m dash from their front doors.

“It was always pretty rugby-mad now, in fairness, on that road,” says Kelleher.

Some kids drift away from this all-consuming passion for sport as they hit secondary school. Not Kelleher. Not with his dad Tim being principle of St Michael’s. He was eight when the school won its first Senior Cup in 2006 and this train really hit top speed.

Noel Reid became only the second Michael’s man to play for Ireland eight years later and he has been followed since by a stream of ready-made talents: men like James Ryan, Dan Leavy, Luke McGrath, the Byrne brothers and Ryan Baird.

Michael’s have utilised top-of-the-shelf coaching brains and established a system backboned by state-of-the-art facilities. Kelleher’s take on when he first started to think in terms of a professional playing career speaks volumes for the culture that has all fostered.

“To be honest, it was kind of when I was in second or third year of school. I was looking at other people in the school, the likes of Luke McGrath, making it straight into the (Leinster) academy. Cathal Marsh as well, and you could see then that it was starting to be one or two lads getting in.

“That set my mind that this was what I wanted to do and it was just about using the coaches I had at school to bring my game forward. The likes of Andy Skehan, Emmet MacMahon, Brian O’Meara, who all coached all these players who were making it into the academy. It was almost tried-and-tested.

“As I was coming up, Dan Leavy and Rory O’Loughlin got into the academy. The following year there was a whole rake of them with Cian, Ross Molony, Josh Murphy, Nick McCarthy, Ross Byrne all going in together at the same time. 

I saw the potential, if I could keep working, that it could be something I could work towards considering the standard of coaching we had.

Kelleher’s path to this point may look straightforward then but he took in different routes along the way. Gaelic football, tennis and basketball all helped hone his physical and sporting attributes and he played a variety of positions in rugby before landing on hooker.

Those younger days, some of them spent patrolling along the back line, are still apparent in the dynamism he brings to the position. One of the attractions to being a hooker, he once said, is that you get to act almost like a fourth back row and see far more of the ball.

It’s no shock, then, to hear that among his favourite players growing up were Sean O’Brien, Jamie Heaslip and Cian Healy, although he never tried to emulate the last of those by dragging his parents’ car up and down a beach.

A standout with the Ireland U20s a few seasons back, he has still only played 28 games of professional rugby but there was some disappointment when Andy Farrell revealed his team for tomorrow’s meeting with Scotland and the young Dubliner had only made the bench.

Stephen Ferris has been among those to voice the opinion that Kelleher is the natural successor to Rory Best and he seemed to show enough to earn the shirt after a good showing against Italy last time in what was his first Six Nations start.

Rob Herring hasn’t done much wrong since taking over from Best this time last year but the Ulsterman is 30 now and the suspicion remains that Kelleher still has everything it takes to move ahead in the succession stakes sooner rather than later.

Patience will pay off. And perspective helps too.

Cian is three years his elder. He has made the circular journey from Leinster to Connacht and back again while his international path has stalled after making an Ireland squad for an uncapped game against the Barbarians six years ago.

It’s a long way from a career to sympathise with but the sight of a younger sibling pushing that bit further ahead will always have the potential for some awkwardness regardless of the family crest.

Not so, says the younger of the two.

“He’s only ever shown me that he’s been supportive and he’ll always be the first person I’ll text after a game. He’d be the first person to text me. The dynamic has never really changed between the two of us. He’s still the older brother. He’s still the one that I look up to and seek advice from because he has been in similar situations before in terms of being brought into that squad for the Barbarians game and also having come up through the 20s.”