Tadhg Furlong in red? The sliding doors moment that could have changed Irish rugby

The Wexford-born tighthead recalls how a move to Munster nearly happened, as Leinster prepare to face a rejuvenated provincial rival

Tadhg Furlong during a Leinster Rugby squad training session at UCD in Dublin. Pic: Shauna Clinton/Sportsfile

Blurred lines? You wouldn’t go that far, but there are fewer degrees of separation between Tadhg Furlong and the crowd occupying the other dressing-room this week when compared with most of his buddies at Leinster.

Home for Furlong is Campile in Wexford. Dunmore East, Passage East and Faithlegg in Waterford all sit just the other side of the River Barrow. Munster was well within his wheelhouse when covid’s 5km restrictions came into play.

School was Good Counsel just up the road in New Ross. It’s a town that sits in and around two hours from Dublin, Cork and from Limerick, and that leaves teenagers with a choice of roads to take once they finish school, none less travelled than the others.

“We kind of scatter in the wind a little bit,” says Furlong.

His plan at the time was to study PE in Limerick. He chuckles now when he wonders what sort of teacher he would have made, but one idea led to another at the time and so he picked up the phone to Ken O’Connell of Sunday’s Well.

O’Connell was a product of PBC in Cork and had played for Munster, Castres, London Irish and for Ireland before taking up an elite development role and then a domestic rugby role with his province. He had also coached Furlong by then with the Irish Youths.

“He’s a great old fella, Kenny’s a great lad, but I remember ringing him and saying,’ I'm thinking of going down to Limerick and wonder could we ever get into the academy around there’, or wherever. They offered me a sub-academy slot in Munster.

“Then Gerry Murphy, who would be a great Leinster man, he rang me up and said, ‘we see something in you, would you come up, and I know you had this going on, but we're going to back you’. They sorted a few things out for me, and off the road up to Dublin I went.” It’s a sliding door that often gets him to thinking. He was only 17 doing his Leaving Cert. Raw. Lots of friends took that road to Limerick. He didn’t know what rugby held for him then, but there was a mighty social scene down there at the time and that wouldn’t have helped.

“It wasn't like, ‘I'm going to be a rugby player’. It's like, ‘I'd love to do this, I don't know if it would work out’. You know that kind of a way? It was very much looking into the unknown. And coming from, I suppose, maybe the background where I did.” 

Furlong at Munster would have been a tantalising prospect.

He was a regular visitor to Whiddy Island in West Cork, which was home to his mother Margaret, still is to some uncles, and was to his late grandmother Noreen O’Leary before she passed away aged 93, three years ago.

Furlong, with his Gaelic football background, would have found more than a few like-minded souls at Munster, but he wound up in a Leinster dressing-room populated mostly by players from Dublin and The Pale who had graduated through the private school system.

He has spoken at times before of the job he found in integrating into his new surrounds in the capital, and at the club, but if there were reasons to think that Munster might have been a good fit then we have the proof over 16 years that Leinster absolutely was.

He developed into a world-class tighthead who has played 266 games of senior professional rugby. His win rate sits at 74%. Furlong has played for his province, for his country and for the British and Irish Lions, and won silverware with all of them.

Leinster and Munster have met 31 times since his debut season in 2013/14, winning 23 of them, but a rivalry dwindling in intensity and relevance was given an injection of meaning and bite by the latter’s big win in Croke Park this time last year.

It was a remarkable success for Clayton McMillan’s men, all the more so for the fact that Leinster had dominated the scrum after earning three penalties at the setpiece within the first 12 minutes.

McMillan has since admitted that the scrum was “problematic” for Munster last term. The change this season has been chalk and cheese with the arrivals of tightheads Kieran Brookes and Jack Aungier and hooker Marnus van der Merwe paying huge dividends.

And new forwards coach Jimmy Duffy, too.

“Obviously, two new tightheads in and, if you want to fix a scrum, getting a South African hooker in is always a good start as well,” said Furlong. “I know I'm saying this as a tighthead, but people make a tighthead to be the most important in the scrum.

“But the hooker has the biggest job to do. You see some of the teams that have scrummaged really well in world rugby, in club rugby, all of them have very, very good scrummaging hookers. It can be a real point of difference for a team.

“South Africans love their scrum and I’ve heard good things about him.” 

Furlong crossed paths with Brookes a decade ago, back in the days when matchday squads were limited to 22 and he had to come off the bench – in place of Simon Zebo - as a loosehead against England at Twickenham.

Brookes has himself slotted in as hooker for Munster this season, and we’ve just seen Ben Tameifuna line out for Bordeaux-Begles in the second row, but Furlong has no desire to branch out and walk those unfamiliar roads.

He’s well settled now, has been for a long time.