Farming gives rise to thriving prop

In the build-up to last season's European Cup final, the Munster pack were doing some scrummaging practice at the UL complex in Limerick. With only eight fit forwards and no one to help steady the scrum machine, it was being pushed around a mite too easily, so they called over a nearby farmer and asked him to park his tractor against it.

He duly did so, turned off the engine, hopped off and lit a cigarette, whereupon the Munster eight shifted machine and tractor along the grass. Later that week in London prior to the Twickenham final, they were joking amongst themselves, imagining the comments if people knew about the paddies shoving against a tractor, or, as one of the city slickers said: "A Massey Ferguson."

"No, hold on a minute," interrupted John Hayes. "That was a John Deere." As the farmer in the team, he knows his tractors. And besides, who's going to argue with six feet, four inches and 19 stone of prime Irish beef, aka Bull Hayes.

Not that there's much mirth in his family's line of work at the moment. He still lives at home (two brothers and two sisters having moved on) and lends a hand on the farm in Cappamore, 12 miles from our meeting point in the Kilmurray Hotel near the UL complex where he would later have a recovery session in the pool. It's a big enough farm, about 150 acres, with about 130 beef cattle there now. Bought by his grandfather, it's been in the family for nigh on 80 years.

"You could do without these kind of times, scaring the life out of everybody," he volunteers. "Looking on television and seeing whole herds of cattle being burned and going up in smoke, that just really drives the nail home. That's what will happen if this thing kicks in."

All the necessary precautions have been taken. "We won't be moving the cattle off the farm yet. They're not ready for the market, so it doesn't bother us yet. But if it got close to the time that they were ready and you had to move them and you were getting low on fodder, in a few weeks time when the grass starts growing, the restrictions will really hit farmers. That would really be awful."

That Hayes is a relative rarity in rugby circles - the likes of Jeremy Staunton, Alan Quinlan, Jimmy Screene and others come from farming stock too - is easily explained. Farmers work a six-day week, and games rarely take place on Sundays. I recall doing a feature on Sligo (then in the fourth division) who could rarely draw on their farming community for this reason and, sure enough, had a somewhat doomed AIL existence as a result.

Nor, as Hayes recalls from his days with Bruff, did farmers find it easy to attend training sessions during the week. "They couldn't just drop everything and go training at six o'clock," he points out. "Some of them were good players but just couldn't make the commitment."

As a child in his hurling-obsessed school of Doon CBS, rugby made little imprint on him save for Five Nations games on television. Last year he went back to his old school for the first time in nine years with local regional development officer and Shannon team-mate John Lacey, and spotted his first sighting of the "Good Luck John Hayes" banner which is draped across Cappamore village for big Munster games or Irish internationals; a source of undoubted pride to the big fella.

There was an audible intake of breath according to Lacey when Hayes stood up. Ostensibly, Hayes was there to present student of the year awards, an irony not lost on some of his former teachers. Hayes laughs, saying: "One of the first comments one of the teachers made was: `It's some contradiction having you here presenting the student of the year awards. You never did a thing here, only messing."

"In my day there wasn't even football or soccer, never mind rugby. It was just hurling. I remember my younger brother Mike breaking his leg in first year (falling) off his bike on a Sunday and when he went back on crutches one of the brothers said: `If you were playing hurling that wouldn't have happened to you.' For lunchtime you hurled, at PE you hurled and you came back after school and hurled. There's a lot more variety now."

The Hayes legend began with a debut at 19 for Bruff, as an utterly bemused blindside flanker in a 0-0 draw against Newcastlewest. From little acorns and all that. Now he's a 27-year-old Lions contender with 10 caps.

After just two seasons of rugby, a big turning point was his couple of seasons with Maorist in New Zealand. Went out a boy and came back a man? Well, Hayes was 16 stone when he went out there, and two unbroken years of rugby led to him weighing 19-and-a-half stone on his return.

This also forced his conversion from second-row to prop. Looking back, Warren Gatland's inclusion of a big, raw Hayes in the Irish squad to tour South Africa in 1998 on the back of just one friendly for Munster almost a year before was a brave call, and the three-year investment is now reaping a rich dividend. He hadn't even done weights.

Opinion remains divided on Hayes, and he cops an unfair amount of flak whenever an Irish - or indeed a Munster - scrum is disrupted, as if he is singularly at fault for an eight-man effort every time.

"I've been with the guy since the start," says his former Shannon coach and current Munster assistant coach Niall O'Donovan, "and he's improved hugely in the last three years. There's little wrong with his scrummaging. The "experts" will tell you he's too big for a tighthead and his back is too long, but you can't pigeon-hole players and insist all props are five feet, 10 inches or 18 stone. Even against France, they replaced Marconnet with Califano and he was able to handle both of them. There's far more emphasis on lineouts, open play and defensive lines now anyway."

The revised rules, whereby a tighthead has to keep his arm on the back of the opposing loosehead, gives them little room for manoeuvre, leaving them utterly reliant on a big hit and almost making them an endangered species. Looseheads have it far better.

The lack of any scrum practice and niggling injuries to both Peter Clohessy and Mick Galwey showed against Italy, as did better preparation along with eight focussed and fit forwards against France.

Save for three rickety scrums against the French, the rest were rock solid, and close inspection of the video also shows Hayes to have been one of Ireland's four or five most influential players on the day.

Aside from his strength and height, the timing of his reaction on opposition throws in tandem with Anthony Foley was once again a primary factor in Ireland winning plenty of French ball. With seven tackles, he was second only to the underrated Foley (Ireland only had to make 63), and was Ireland's seventh-highest ball carrier with half a dozen. Nor does this take into account the amount of rucks he hits.

It was one of the best all-round performances by a tighthead in the championship this season. "It's funny the way it goes. I honestly believe there are some matches when I do not touch the ball once, only to pick it up and hand it to somebody else when the whistle is gone. No joke in that. Then there are other days when you happen to get the ball in your hands. But you don't want to go looking for it, because you'll be forgetting other jobs."

Spoken like the honest team toiler he is. Something of a gentle giant, selfeffacing and even a little shy, he's happiest in the company he knows best. Rugby has opened up horizons and given him experiences he knows he'd never otherwise have had and he's grateful for that, though he's definitely one man who won't be fazed by success. "It's nice when people say hello to me . . . but you are who you are."

O'Donovan, Declan Kidney, Gatland, Clohessy, Galwey - there've been big influences along the way, although Hayes singles out Keith Wood for special praise."If anyone benefitted from the year he spent with Munster, I did. It was the whole package, his attitude to training, even in the gym."

Though the disruptions to the championship probably haven't done him any favours, he's now rightly a Lions candidate. A low-mileage 27-year-old who takes good care of himself, the best is yet to come.

When it's all over, farming is ultimately something he'd like to go back to for "the peace and quietness of it". His words make it sound almost like fishing, and he laughs at them himself.

"There's a lot of hard work in it too and there'd be farmers out there who'd say `come and do my work if you like it that much.' I do like going home to it and now that it's getting brighter in the evenings with spring, it takes your mind off rugby.

"Playing in front of 50,000 people at Lansdowne Road is unbelievable but when you're home on Sunday in the peace and quiet, you appreciate it even more. One helps the other."