Artist Healy keen to master dark arts of the scrum

Cian Healy doesn't conform to the stereotype of a prop, but he will be doing his best to get an eight-man drive going tomorrow, writes JOHN O'SULLIVAN

AT FACE value, Cian Healy moves to a different beat, removed from the conventional rhythms of a professional rugby player as defined by his interests outside the sport. An occasional DJ who enjoys a passion for painting certainly doesn’t pander to the stereotypical image of a prop, but neither does an artistic bent make him a unique specimen in the frontrow fraternity. After all, former Argentine prop Omar Hasan was a classically-trained opera singer.

A portrait of the artist as a young rugby international does, though, offer a more colourful canvas. His choice of transport also takes him further from the mainstream: a Land Rover Defender that was pimped to his specifications.

There appears nothing contrived about his image. The 24-year-old loves rugby, music, painting and his jeep, and is in a position to pursue those activities. The jigsaw fits neatly together.

The ancillary interests shouldn’t camouflage or distract from the fact he is an excellent rugby player. By his own admission, he doesn’t spend hours poring over footage of matches or offering to deconstruct the finer points of the scrum, but that doesn’t mean he’s careless about his homework.

Far from it. He just prefers to condense his study period.

Sitting before a warming fire on a raw afternoon in Carton House during the week, he sifts through the ashes of Ireland’s World Cup defeat to Wales in New Zealand. There isn’t a trace of a revenge motif, rather an appreciation of lessons that must be absorbed so as avoid suffering the disappointment of being outmanoeuvred in the scrum again.

There is a rider, though. It’s not as if time has stood still in the interim. Both teams will have moved on in playing philosophy, tweaking bits and pieces of the playbook, while the composition of the Welsh side in personnel terms will be appreciably altered.

Healy, though, will stare down a familiar face at scrum time in Lions tighthead prop Adam Jones. This facet of the game is a unit skill, involving all eight forwards, but ascendancy in the initial collision is largely engineered by the frontrow. He explained: “They’re pretty good with their angles. That’s where I seemed to struggle, looking over the World Cup tape.

“They caught me on a couple of angles and that’s something I have worked on a fair bit. We have worked on it as a frontrow over the last week, and it is also something we concentrated on at provincial level.

“You can see all the different teams have been going in, sorting out angles, working with each other to try and get the upper hand. Hopefully that will be something we can take away from their game.”

A familiar image drawn from the modern scrum is the alignment of the props, heads bobbing and weaving like boxers, as they indulge in a nanosecond of brinkmanship, awaiting the referee’s call to engage.

Healy offers a layman’s guide to the posturing. “My understanding of it is the tighthead wants me to have my head out wider so I can’t hit straight in on his chest and get into the position I want to be in. He wants to send me up his rib cage, where I don’t want to be. If I forced my way into a similar position it would be tucking under the hooker and a lot of refs pull up on that.

“It’s kind of a way of hiding as a loosehead as well, and I’m not really into it. I like getting my shoulder out and have a hit on it; seeing if I can outmuscle him.”

Referees will issue general instructions to the opposing frontrows prior to a game, specifying the cadence of their scrum direction and what they will and will not permit.

Healy continues: “The head gap is rarely spoken about. It’s something you would bring up yourself. The ref would say control the gap. He might glance over and see if one head hits off another; you’ll have to square it up. It’s something you have to adapt to. If it happens during a game you have to either reset as a frontrow, or just deal with it.”

He acknowledges that his game must continually evolve – in every respect. He is a coruscating ball-carrier, blessed with a more subtle creative gene. His handling, passing and offloading is impressive but so too his knack of finding space and exploiting it. He doesn’t suffer from the agoraphobia that afflicts some forwards.

He admits: “Mentally, I would have a different outlook in how I want to approach strategies going into a game, but at the same time I don’t take in a hell of a lot out of that. I look at for one of the days during the week, think about it and then it’s gone. At the end of the day it’s about getting out there and playing well. There’s no great mystery.

“Some games it just happens as you get into it. If you notice that lads like Seánie and Jamie are making big carries then it’s about getting in and doing my job; hitting rucks, working hard at the scrum and let them do the carrying.

“If you feel there is a need to step it up and bring that extra bit, then you have to split your role and get in a bit more running, a bit more aggression going forward. Usually when you are doing one well the other is going to come. It’s just how long you can last at that pace,” he laughs.

Healy doesn’t offer a preference for rampaging in the wide open spaces or careering through a fleshy wall of tacklers, citing the end product for the team as the ultimate arbiter in the satisfaction stakes. He’s also keen to look forward rather than seek motivation in two consecutive defeats against Wales. “ a new year, a new opportunity. There are some things might hang on to you, specific things, but not the whole game; that would be dwelling on some sort of revenge.

“You are going forward. There’s no point in looking back at it. It’s going to be a different challenge. They are going to have a different strategy; we are going to have a different strategy.”

This season Healy has yet to finish a match for his province, and that’s definitely not by choice. Like most young players, “squad rotation” is anathema to him. Injury has brought a premature end to one of two games of the 10 he has played for Leinster, while he has shared the loosehead duties with Heinke van der Merwe.

Those experiences perhaps define his personal ambition for the Six Nations Championship. “I would like to play every minute of every game and end up with a Grand Slam. I missed out on the last one ; I was still learning.

“I am pretty envious of the lads. I would like to be a part of that.” That ambition will be road-tested at the Aviva Stadium tomorrow afternoon.