O'Sullivan gets the heart pounding

Sideline Cut:Obscure sports coaches all over the country will be gratified by several scenes in RTÉ's high-octane and sophisticated film on the fortunes of the Ireland rugby team during last season's Six Nations. In an age when the dressingroom has become sacrosanct and off limits, the filmmakers managed something of a coup by persuading Eddie O'Sullivan to permit the presence of cameras for those immense and private moments before his team took the field in Croke Park and elsewhere.

It is generally acknowledged O'Sullivan is one of the most diligent and technically absorbed coaches in professional rugby but after all the plays had been learned, videos analysed and muscles massaged, when his team stood in a huddle in that confined room in the vaults of the stadium, there was only one thing left for any coach to do.

In time-honoured tradition, Eddie lashed his boys with a string of well chosen vows and valedictions peppered with curses. When the film is aired tomorrow night, hundreds of lowly junior coaches will stare in wide-eyed appreciation as Eddie invokes a sense of "f****n pride", demands the spilling of "f****n blood", and they will conclude, with a surge of pride and relief the methodology of the Irish rugby coach differs little than their own.

In other words, hundreds of frustrated Alex Fergusons or John O'Mahonys or Brian Codys will be able to console themselves that they, too, could have managed at the top, given their chance.

Although this is the era of glorifying the manager, we seldom pause to give consideration to the loneliness of the position. Once any team leaves the cocoon of the dressingroom and the players commit themselves to the speed and pressure of the game and the outside forces like the crowd, the weather and opposing players, the coach is a man cast adrift. Of course, he has the power to make substitutions and to alter strategy and to launch surprise, apoplectic attacks at a stunned linesman every now and again. But once a match begins, the coach or manager is like a man standing before a whirlwind believing he can alter its direction by blowing at it. That is why so many managers walk up and down the sideline like men possessed, making urgent gestures with their arms which are generally understood by nobody but themselves and, possibly, their mothers, who can connect such movements to babyhood.

They shout instructions to players who cannot possibly hear them and who are, in any case, too shagged out to obey them if they do. Sometimes they study the game intently, like Mickey Harte, who can stand through a blood-and-guts midwinter game in Omagh with the serene expression of an art connoisseur lost in the joys of a Dutch masterpiece. Others, Jose Mourinho being the most suave exponent, slouch indifferently in front of proceedings, almost flaunting their acknowledgment they can stop nothing now.

And that is largely the truth of it. Sometimes changes a manager makes will work, other times they will not. He is living on a prayer until he gets his team back into the dressingroom, where he is the voice and king.

The power of Reaching for Glory lies in those dressingroom scenes. Although the public knew O'Sullivan was, at heart, hugely passionate about the game, he rarely wore that on his sleeve and was always master of his emotions, regardless of how his teams performed. Which is not to say he loses control here, but the mask slips to reveal the old coaching truism that nothing works quite so powerfully as a well-delivered, guttural "Come on ta f***, lads". You can have all the coaching badges and technical knowledge in the world, but in the dressingroom you have to be able to channel all that loose energy and nerves into one coherent force. O'Sullivan has no difficulty in getting the heart pounding.

"Every f***** last ounce of energy, every f***** last drop of blood goes on the line - but you have to make it f***** happen," he demands - and that was just when some of the team decided to brave the public bar in the hope of a late pint on the last night of the tournament. O'Sullivan's speeches would pump anybody up - if hundreds of Irishmen don't actually take up rugby after watching this show on Monday night, they will at least give the cushions on the couch a damn good pummelling. Then again, he was speaking to a team about to walk onto Croke Park to face England. It was not a hard sell.

That dank Saturday afternoon in Dublin has already passed into Irish sporting lore, a day of high patriotism and a crowd brimming with the ready-made tears of a Tuesday afternoon Oprah Winfrey show.

People cried during the Irish anthem, they cried during God Save the Queen and they had a wee sniffle during the first try.

It could be they were all overwhelmed by the hassle of actually getting tickets for the bloody game. But amid so many tears, Ireland dared not lose.

The traditional pep talk for the Irish team involved working the lads into a state of near-psychotic frenzy before sending them out to cannibalise the gritty English or suave French or whoever. Then, the inevitable encumbrances of fitness, ball skill, the absence of an actual plan began to take shape on the scoreboard. There were quite a few years, post the fine vintage of 1985, when our grandest ambition consisted of hoping poor Fred Cogley would get to commentate on another Irish try before he hung up the voice box. But that was then. The present Irish team is dazzling, and against England they retreated to the dressingroom having giving Blighty 40 minutes of a thumping. Even allowing for the accomplishments of the present side, this was uncertain ground.

"We have been good, I'll give you that," admitted captain Brian O'Driscoll, a bit stumped for words, let alone curses. "But we could be great."

O'Driscoll was much happier and more authoritative in the tense, wired moments before the games, when he could demand his team-mates give everything. As they coasted against England, it was hard to ask for anything more.

There are plenty of flattering, cinematic shots of Ireland's heroes at their most buff and most poignant but any tendency to overly glamorise their team or their pursuits are undercut by the readiness of the players to slash each other's egos down to size. And the documentary leaves a lasting impression of the underlying repetition and even the solitariness of being a full-time professional.

As has been generally acknowledged, this Irish team come across as a decent bunch of people and that they manage to knock a bit of fun out of the long routine of training days, bus rides and hotel suites is clear.

But perhaps the most powerful scene features the team in the minutes after the hard-earned victory away to Wales, when they are all collapsed on seats and benches, silent and spent and all lost in their own worlds now that the need to be a part of the team has abated - for an hour or two at least.