Jack Conan aims to take another shot on world stage

All told, 175 players have seen their names listed in Irish World Cup squads. That’s a lot of hard luck stories and regrets but Conan has a claim to be up there with the most frustrating among them.

Jack Conan training with Ireland. Pic Credit ©INPHO/Ben Brady

Ireland’s relationship with the Rugby World Cup has been cruel bordering on toxic. It’s been a long-term lament of jilted affection, unconsummated promise, and no little recrimination and the numbers involved are testament to the depths plummeted.

Nine tournaments have produced as many failures over the first 32 years of the tournament’s history. Ireland have played 39 games, their win ratio of just over 61% rendered moot by a failure to win a single knockout game.

All told, 175 players have seen their names listed in Irish World Cup squads. That’s a lot of hard luck stories and regrets but Jack Conan’s addition to that canon in 2019 had a claim to be up there with the most frustrating among them.

He was 27 at the time, a man entering his prime and aiming to make a dent on the world stage. Twenty-two minutes off the bench against Scotland in the opener got him ticking but then a foot issue he had been managing flared up in training a few days later.

An innocuous nothing that changed everything.

Joe Schmidt had him pencilled in to start the second game, against the hosts Japan in Fukuroi. He ended up watching what turned into a car crash experience in a moon boot on the sideline and with a plane ticket home for the following day all but sticking out from his pocket.

“So that was a strange occasion, to be in the changing-room and knowing I wouldn’t play any more part while the lads were gutted. You kind of feel for the lads but obviously useless because there’s nothing you can do and you can’t help out.”

Timing, eh?

There was more. The plan was for a return the following spring when Leinster were due in South Africa. Didn’t happen. Covid was already threatening and it washed over Ireland more or less that same week. Hey, it put his own problems into perspective.

All told, it was 15 months after that cameo against the Scots in Yokohama before he got to wear the green again and Conan is an open enough book to admit that there were times when he wondered if he would ever make it back to the Test grade again.

“Firstly, it was a big thing to overcome. The injury itself, there was no guarantee I would come back from it. There are a lot of lads who retired from the same injury I had, not that it ever got to that point, but you knew it was going to be a physically and mentally testing journey from the outset.”

Injuries are as endemic to rugby as weeds to your back garden but he has had to deal with his fair share of them and with what proved to be a cyst on his pituitary gland that made him feel as if he had aged 10 years in two months.

He has been in and out of the Ireland XV this past two seasons but — his contribution against Italy in the Six Nations aside — there is a contentment in his form for club and country even with Leinster failing to get over the line in ‘Europe’ or in the URC.

If he feels in a good place then that goes for the collective.

Conan during a press conference recently. Pic Credit ©INPHO/Ben Brady

Ireland’s players have been lauding the pre-season put together for them by the coaching staff this last few weeks. There is no mindless fitness drudgery and, instead, a rugby-focused balance being struck between that physical prep and mental readiness.

Not at all like the programme from four years ago.

“It’s vastly different, if I’m honest. Probably got a lot of things wrong four years ago … that I don’t really want to get into now, but the way we are training now, it’s all rugby-related. It’s getting fitter through rugby and performing under fatigue.

“I think it’s really going to stand to us. We’re just adding layers and layers on top of the things we have already been trying to perfect over the last few years, going back to the basics and continually trying to get better.”

If Ireland go to France with a collective urge to put so many historic wrongs right then Conan is similarly eager to make up for his own past misfortune. There is a drive there to show what he can do on the global stage.

Never say never and all, but he acknowledged himself that this might be his last shot at it. He will be 35 by the time 2027 rolls around and that curtailed experience in Asia has taught him to be grateful for the life he leads and the opportunities he has had.

“Bowing out on that stage in the World Cup and getting injured just makes you so much hungrier to do it again and be back there and get another shot at it: not that I wasn’t grateful four years ago.

“Maybe I just didn’t grasp the magnitude of playing for Ireland in a World Cup, but I think because of the experiences I had in Japan they definitely make me appreciate the position I’m in at the moment.”