A winner, a leader and a legend

Isn't it ironic? At 33, Mick Galwey is finally being appreciated for the player he is and, what's more, the leader he is and the winner he is. Why, much more of this and he might even become a legend in his own playing days.

Nobody quite encapsulates the Munster spirit like Galwey does. You take a cursory glance through his playing CV and realise he's won eight Munster Cup medals with Shannon, four AIL medals with Shannon, and after 90-odd provincial caps led Munster to their first back-to-back interprovincial titles and now to their second European Cup quarter-final in a row. The guy's a winner alright.

He's been there for most of Munster's big days of the last generation, such as the win over then world champions Australia in 1992 at Musgrave Park. And come to think of it, studded among his 29 caps have been a couple of Ireland's better days, such as Twickenham '94 and Stade de France 2000.

Brent Pope, for one, believes Galwey, or Gaillimh, as he's generally know, belongs in that category reserved for legends of Irish forward play, alongside the likes of Willie John McBride, Phil Orr, Fergus Slattery, not to mention contemporaries such as Peter Clohessy.

"I haven't changed," he admits with an ironic smile. "I still give it my sixpence worth. I might have become a more positive player and a more confident player. Okay my fitness levels might be a bit better now, but to be honest with you five or six years ago I would have handled more ball in games. I probably would have played more of an individual game before, now I'm playing more of a team game. But I'm certainly not a better player than I was five or six years ago. I was faster and I was lighter."

"Yes, I find it ironic but it's given me great satisfaction to come back, when I see all the players who have come and gone," he says, and reminds you that his first senior tour was to France in 1988. "I tell Ronan O'Gara I played with Tony Ward," says Galwey, just to show the youngster how old he is.

Throughout it all few have suffered the slings of selectorial arrows more than he has. Players close to him recently totted it up and reckon he's been dropped 13 times by Ireland. Now that's ridiculous. Not that he harbours grudges, for it all seems like water off a duck's back to him.

The one that rankles is '95. "I couldn't even get into the Irish A squad. I was 26 or 27 and I wasn't even one of the top 40 players in the country and I didn't think I deserved to be left out of the World Cup squad. But when you get a bad blow like that, you come back and you appreciate everything you get after that. You don't take anything for granted."

The way he learnt of his World Cup exclusion still takes believing. "I read it on teletext."

A dozen seasons on and Galwey is still proving himself it seems. This season has been typically bizarre, in that he was left out of another Irish World Cup squad yet now finds himself back in the starting team.

He is correctly hailed as the man who kept the good ship Munster afloat in their late wins this season as much by word of mouth as deed. So you can't help wondering if a panic-stricken Ireland would have been better off in Lens had it been the grizzled 33-year-old coming on with 20 minutes to go rather than the promising but relatively inexperienced Bob Casey.

Reflecting on the career lulls, to a degree it was a question of size, and the changed rules did as much as anything to prolong his career. "When the likes of (England's) Wade Dooley and Paul Ackford were around I was dwarfed and there didn't seem much of a future for me. It's funny, but now it's not even mentioned. I think the game nowadays suits the more complete footballers."

Munster have probably benefited most in Irish rugby from professionalism. Spirit and heart and football ability carried them through the pain barrier but weren't enough higher up the scale, and their clubs' dominance of the AIL was a double-edged sword.

"We always gave it our best shot and we always gave it heart but now we have our fitness levels," he says, citing the 1992 win over the then world champions Australia as "probably the last of the boot, bollickin' and bitin' kind of wins.

"But then we played them in Thomond Park in 1996 and they hammered us. And that was the big difference, I thought to myself "This side are a truly professional outfit." It was a hard pill to swallow really. They'd probably be favourites to beat us tomorrow but we wouldn't get a hammering like that again."

Ask him if he was as fit as he ought to have been at stages in his career and he admits: "Probably not throughout my career, no. I've enjoyed the professional era to be honest. I took well to it and I trained harder, and at the end of the day you were able to make more sacrifices. It's just a great job to have, being a professional rugby player. And I'm sure there's lots of young fellas out there who would love to be in our shoes."

"I've been lucky enough to have seen it all, to have been through the bad times when you had to pay your own train fare up to a match and now we're put up in the best hotels. That's not only at club level but even at Munster level. I remember when I subbed for Munster first we didn't even have tracksuits, and that was a sign of the times. I can remember sitting up in Ravenhill with a GAA Kerry tracksuit on me," he recalls with a laugh.

Nowadays, suddenly, Munster and Ireland (and Leinster for that matter) are finishing matches stronger than they start them. "This is the one thing that Ireland lacked in the last number of seasons. Now that's obviously a fitness thing but it's mental as well. At Munster we've pulled a few games out of the bag and if we didn't believe we could do it, it wouldn't have happened."

No one's helped them believe more than Galwey. It's not, say his team-mates, that he's particularly incisive technically, but he invariably speaks positively and instils self-belief in those around him. Confidence can move mountains, as Galwey says.

Watching Ireland close-up and personal, when in a huddle or in between plays, Galwey seems to be talking more than most. Yet according to his second-row partner Malcolm O'Kelly, Galwey doesn't actually say that much. "It's just that whenever he does talk everybody listens. He has this aura and air of respect about him."

Yet from when he joined Shannon at 18 until he was about 24 he "didn't say a word on the pitch. You just listened and learned when you had the likes of Ginger McLoughlin, Colm Tucker and Niall (O'Donovan), and Ger McMahon was a great captain. And then you came on to the Munster scene and you had Mannix (Donal Lenihan), Phil Danaher and Terry Kingston, who was a great captain.

"Then suddenly you made pack leader of Shannon, then captain of Shannon, then pack leader of Munster and all of a sudden I've been captain of Munster for four or five years. And every year I can honestly say I'm gaining in confidence."

Now his father figure role is symbolised by his bear-hugging of Peter Stringer and Ronan O'Gara for the national anthems. O'Gara speaks of his provincial captain with reverence. "He's the most down-to-earth person you'll ever meet, especially when you think of all he's achieved. For a young fella if you're not sure of yourself when you come into a squad he's always there for you," said O'Gara.

Galwey's isn't purely a glorified consultancy role mind. Recounting Munster's comeback win against Saracens, unquestionably the performance of the season outside of the international team, O'Gara says: "It was coming up to half-time, we were 12 points down and they were getting well on top. Then he (Galwey) started pinching balls off them, ripping balls out in the tackle, charging at them with the ball in hand and bouncing off guys. It was weird. You were thinking "he can't be doing this".

Keith Wood has described Galwey (and Peter Clohessy) as the last of the dinosaurs, and yet he is still a young man. "People ask me when am I giving up. I've no notion of giving up. When I'm not able to play or when I'm not good enough, that's when I'll give up. But I haven't set a date for when Mick Galwey's going to hang up his boots."