Keeping it in the family

While everyone else in the Irish squad was toing and froing in the foyer of the Castletroy Hotel last Tuesday, Paul and Richard Wallace were quietly sitting in a corner talking to their parents, Michael and Greta. On walking them to the door, Richard gave his mother a big playful hug. For the Wallaces, international rugby is very much a family affair.

There was a touching moment in the preamble to the national anthems in Paris a month ago when Paul and Richard squared up to each other, forehead to forehead. Irish mothers everywhere must have had a tear in their eye. It looked like rousing, passionate, moving stuff. Well, to a point.

"I was saying `Richie, there's a camera on us, go away'," reveals Paul in mock embarrassment, before laughing heartily at the memory of it all. "And Richie was giving it the old `c'mon, c'mon, we're going to do it.' I was saying; `Richie, will you cop on'."

"So before the Welsh match I waited to see where he ended up," continues Paul, who is nearly in stitches by now, "And I went halfway to the other end. I got an awful slagging about it."

Nonetheless, the incident told how close the Wallaces are, albeit with a natural ability to slag each other. A good way of goading Paul is to go on about how talented his younger brother David is - David is a back-row cross between his two international elders.

There's an elder sibling as well, flanker Henry, who has played a few senior games for Wanderers this season, and of course the youngest, up-and-coming back-rower David, who played for the under-21s again yesterday after stints on the A side. When David was recently demoted from the A side to the under-21s, he got the usual stuff. "Oh, you're on the way down now."

Yet nothing, absolutely nothing, would probably give them greater pleasure than the three of them, uniquely, all playing together for Ireland one day. When Paul was being hailed last season, he was telling anyone who would listen that Richard was playing out of his skin for Saracens.

Images of the Wallaces at home in the early years are of a garden with the grass continually cut up, and broken furniture being moved out of the way to accommodate impromptu games in the living-room. It could get a little zany at times, but apparently it wasn't quite like that.

It was in the blood, though. Their father played with Cobh Pirates and London Irish. "But he was mainly into sailing. That was his big sport, although he was always into rugby. My uncle (Johnny) played rugby as well."

For all that, Paul Wallace came to rugby late enough at the age of 10. Reared initially in Cork, he was educated at a non-rugby school, Rochestown College, and so played Gaelic football until he was introduced to underage rugby with Cork Constitution (on the same team as David Corkery and Darragh O'Mahony).

All changed when the family moved to Limerick, where the 15year-old Wallace was immediately converted to tight-head, from previous incarnations as a second row and flanker, for his three years at Crescent College because of a surfeit of back-rowers at the school.

Nothing too technically deep either. "There was a shortage of props and I was the biggest. I'd never played there before so that was a bit of a jump. But I learned my lessons there fairly sharpish. The first few guys I came up against were like Leinster schools' props and so forth. They were three years older and I got absolutely stuffed. You learn the hard way to look after yourself."

He was a quick learner too, winning back-to-back Munster Schools' Cups with Crescent. They were a good vintage. In the 1989 side there was Billy O'Shea, Gareth Dinneen and Shane Leahy. The 1990 side "fairly walked away with it", he said. It contained Stephen Tuohy, now Young Munster's out-half, Mike O'Meara, hooker with Shannon, Crescent and Munster, Alan Reddan, now of Galwegians and Connacht, Anthony O'Dwyer, the Crescent centre, and Brian Begley.

As props go, Wallace is what you might call a self-made prop. "I suppose when you're forced into a position you have to put on weight and I started doing weights in about my second year in university. I was big enough, but when I was in school I was about 14 stone whereas the other prop was about 18 stone."

Though regarded as a son of Limerick, "unless I'm in Cork", he lived there for only three years. Plenty have claims on the wandering one. He studied and played for UCC, as well as the Irish Universities, the Irish under-21s, the Irish Development team and Munster, before moving to Dublin and playing with Blackrock, Leinster, Ireland A and finally Ireland and, ultimately, the Lions. The whole gamut. When you think about it, he is quite an achiever, probably Irish rugby's biggest achiever over the last year.

"Unfortunately, most of my breaks were down to Peter Clohessy's misfortunes," said Wallace somewhat sheepishly. "In the World Cup (1995) when Peter cried off, and then again the stamping incident and then again the Lions' tour when Peter got injured."

Clohessy must hate him. "We get on very well actually. No problem. We came up against each other in years gone by and y'know, it was tough enough going but it was always fair. Peter's a very nice bloke despite some of the press trying to create a myth about him. Personally, I regard him as a good friend."

If there was one misfortune to befall Clohessy which Wallace should still be thanking him for it was last summer. Aggrieved at missing out on the original Lions selection, Wallace was "in a room just like this, in this hotel" preparing for the Development tour when the call came from the IRFU's Philip Browne to notify him of his late call-up for the Lions' squad the Monday before both squads departed later that week. "I thought it was someone winding me up."

To think of it, a winning Lions series instead of five weeks of unremitting 60-nilers on a patched-up development tour. He can make a joke of it now. "I could see the writing on the wall a bit. I was thinking `I've had a tough enough season, now going on this; now I know why all the other lads are crying off. I should be old enough now to have copped on, and New Zealand of all places.' So once that call come through, there was a sigh of relief."

Like ships passing in the night, Wallace arrived in Heathrow as Clohessy was making his way home. "And the worst thing was I couldn't get the smile off my face, and it's even worse if you're trying."

He may appear a fairly easy-going, good-humoured kind of fellow, but there's a steely-eyed determination and innate self-confidence about him. He watched the first three Lions tour games as third-choice tight-head, but knew that his very technical style of scrummaging would be more suited to matching the likes of Os du Randt than the power-based style of Jason Leonard and David Young.

Even with his scrummaging on a par, Wallace's superb tackling (and organisation of those around him) allied to his dynamism as a ball-carrier made him one of the unequivocal successes of the tour. Yet he feels unfairly victimised about his scrummaging technique, as if there's a bias against a relatively small Irish prop doing so well.

"Some referees who don't know what you're doing, try and create more problems basically." The nadir were the couple of costly penalties against the Scots, the second for briefly putting his hand on the ground effectively deciding the match.

"I was very fed up to be honest. The game was going fine all day. If anything they were dropping it and just getting warned for it. Then all of a sudden, one penalty was for boring and the second one was for having a hand on the ground. I must say I thought that was a bit of an outrageous decision to be honest. To win a test match on something like that, I thought, was ridiculous."

He still seems to be under constant scrutiny. Even last Saturday, Ed Morrison penalised him at an attacking Saracens' scrum for excessive boring. By raising his game for the big ones, he's survived this season but feels that he hasn't really maintained his form. He's probably a likely candidate for a summer off rather than the tour to South Africa.

For the last two seasons he's been with Saracens, and one of the unfortunate consequences of this very modern career is that not only has he never played with younger brother David, he's only seen him play one schools' cup tie and one senior game. "It's not through lack of effort, but when you're playing yourself you don't get a chance to see him play."

He believes, quite categorically, that moving to England has made him a better player but admits that playing too much rugby "might be one of the problems. I've become a better player over there but I'm probably not as fresh as if I was back here. It would be much easier to raise yourself for, like, seven weeks of the season."

He's another year left on his contract. After that who knows? "There mightn't be a club scene in England the way things are going. It's hard to say. I'm quite happy where I am. I'd much prefer to live in Ireland."

"But for the rugby I'm playing now, the standard is a lot higher. The thing is if you look at coming back here and you're playing in an All-Ireland league match with maybe 100 people watching, compared to say our league game against Newcastle, already 22,000 tickets have been sold. Another thing: you'd be a professional training with amateurs back here."

Wallace has had little respite this season, the only saving grace being Saracens' participation in the European Conference as opposed to the Cup, even if the game in Narbonne - featuring eye gouging and the like - was one of the dirtiest he's ever played in.

Yet he concedes that a high octane top-of-the-table league game with Newcastle and a cup semi-final with Northampton since the meeting with Wales hardly constitutes ideal preparation for a tilt at England.

"You gotta earn your keep somehow," he says, despite playing with a groin injury for the last month. "It's hard going. I don't feel too bad, I'm pretty fresh this week but it's tough getting yourself up mentally for all three games. You've got to be professional."

He must be getting a good wedge, as they say?

"I wouldn't be over there if it was bad, put it that way," he smiles.

Brilliantly marketed off the pitch, Saracens are a beacon of the professional era; raising the average attendance at Vicarage Road from around 2,000 to about 10,000. However, he still doesn't know where the supporters' penchant for wearing "the Fez" comes from, nor the synchronised hand-waving known as "the vibes" whenever Michael Lynagh takes a place kick.

Within the dressing-room, there's clearly something special there as well. Lynagh and Phillippe Sella muck in with the rest of them, and have a Twickenham Cup final as a swansong along with their pursuit of Newcastle for the league title.

Yet despite his membership of the Lions' Irish quartet, aka the Awesome Foursome, Wallace sees Sella, Lynagh and Francois Pienaar being submerged every time they go out and concludes: "I like my anonymity."

Playing within the English set-up should assist Wallace and the English-based Irish players this afternoon. "It will remove any sense of awe we have had. We've got to get up in their faces like we did against France. If we play like we did that day, and make sure it's a tight game, we have a chance."

For the pre-match pageant, it'll be interesting to see how far he keeps his distance from the right-winger. Mind you, while he might be able to beat up his older brother now, Richard would have no bother catching him.

Paul Wallace's standard reply to the stark contrast provided by international brothers on the wing and at prop is that he was quicker to the dinner table. But, as every parent of budding young rugby players would like to know, what was it that Greta put on the kitchen table?

"Spuds, spuds and lots more mashed spuds," reveals the tighthead. "The usual Irish diet." So there's the secret.