Many phases later, Rog still delivering

PROFILE: RONAN O'GARA:Fourteen years after his Heineken Cup debut, Ronan O'Gara is still deftly dictating play

BLOW THE dust off the shoe box and lift off the lid. You’re looking back on another world entirely. Munster turned up at The Stoop on September 7th, 1997 wearing what Ronan O’Gara himself called “manky old O’Neill’s tracksuits”.

The Harlequins players had their names on the backs of their jerseys. Runts against royalty.

The game was nuts. Unfettered chaos from beginning to end. For O’Gara’s first match in the competition, it was like nothing that would come in its wake. To this day, it’s still the highest-scoring Heineken Cup game Munster have ever been involved in, with Quins running out 48-40 winners. Munster lost despite racking up five tries – unimaginable these days and something they’ve never repeated in the competition since.

Mick Galwey even thumped Keith Wood at one point and scratched his cornea – again, not something you see every day.

O’Gara did his bit. He kicked three penalties and converted three of the tries but in truth, Munster were a bit like a little kid swinging punches while his big brother holds him at bay with a hand on his forehead. They had energy and passion and all that jazz but hardly any of them thought they could win and for the most part they were delighted with just having run it close.

When it was all over they spent the night on the batter in London before the 20-year-old O’Gara rolled back into college at UCC a day late on the Tuesday.

If that day was the stable at Bethlehem, you didn’t hear many pronounce joy to the world. For all the star-power in the Harlequins side, nothing about the fixture was capable of scaring up much of a crowd. The official attendance at The Stoop was marked down as just 3,682. Only twice in all the games since then has O’Gara played in front of fewer punters in the Heineken Cup – in Padua in 1998 and in Viadana in 2002. Otherwise, this was it. Lowest of the low.

You can mark the distance from there to here in a million ways. In the 99 Heineken Cup games he’s played, with 72 wins and 27 defeats. In the 40 stadiums he’s visited in seven countries – 13 in France, 10 in England, nine in Wales, four in Ireland, two in Italy, one each in Spain and Switzerland (and yet, quirkily, none in Scotland). In the 1,221 points which put him 381 ahead of the next guy, Stephen Jones. Or the 461 goals kicked, more than the third and fourth men combined.

Those third and fourth men are Diego Dominguez and Dmitri Yachvilli, by the by.

“The whole competition is synonymous with O’Gara,” says Wood, an opponent on that first afternoon but a club-mate for a season soon after. “He came into it as a callow-faced youth and he’s managed to fight his corner consistently. I remember at the very start in my year back in Munster, in 1999, he popped over two kicks in two matches against Saracens home and away and it was just phenomenal to watch him.

“He didn’t feel the pressure even though he was a guy who was just learning his trade at the time and trying to deal with everything that was happening. The fact he was able to do it then and has been able to keep doing it all the way through is remarkable.”

Those last-play kicks have made him famous. That first one against Saracens in 1999 came in only his sixth game in the competition, sealing a 35-34 win away in Vicarage Road. Of the 72 wins O’Gara has been in the shirt for down the years, nine have finished with him putting Munster in the lead inside the closing five minutes.

And like Wood says, he’s doing it still, slicing the blade across the necks of both Northampton and Castres in the opening two rounds this season.

“It comes down to the natural arrogance you would want as a 10,” Wood says. “Or the natural arrogance you would want as a quarterback in American football. That’s the reason they’re there – to give the coup de grace when it presents itself. He’s a guy who has grown into that role.”

When that pressure comes on, he’s quite happy to stand up and make the decision when he needs to.

“In that first game against Northampton, he stood back and waited 41 phases and in the second one against Castres he waited five or six. He was never going to be rushed, he was always going to wait until it was right. That put his team under unbelievable pressure to deliver the phases. I mean phenomenal pressure. But he trusted the team and the team trusted him. Which is pretty cool.”

It was after the Northampton game that Paul O’Connell came up with the line that O’Gara would love every game to end with him having to kick the winning score.

But why? You play the game to win the game, obviously, but there have been enough examples in the past two World Cups alone of teams going home for the want of someone dropping back into the pocket to be the man.

How come O’Gara is different?

“Well, that’s what every guy grows up wanting to be, isn’t it really?” O’Connell says now.

“Certainly when you’re a young kid playing at home, that’s the guy you want to grow up to be. But then when you are actually there, it’s a different story. You realise that the pressure is a whole lot different than you thought it would be and that’s when you find out who wants it and who doesn’t.

“I don’t know if as many people want it at that point as want it growing up but he certainly does. Maybe there are plenty who want it but not many can produce as consistently as he does in that spot. A big part of it is confidence.

“When you play outhalf, you spend a career either being the hero or getting the blame for everything. You have to have a lot of mental strength to spend a very long time at the top when you’re a number 10. Because even now, if we beat Scarlets on Saturday you can be guaranteed that a lot of it in a media context or in a public context will be considered to be down to Rog.

“If we lose, probably the same will apply. So you need to be very mentally strong and that’s something he has in abundance.”

When he made his debut back in 1997, that first weekend saw total attendances at Heineken Cup games across the continent struggle up only as far as a combined total of 53,682. Three weeks ago, 141,743 people paid through the gates to watch the latest round and he kept 13,500 of them rooted to their seats in the Stade Ernest Wallon until that final kick. As he grew, as Munster grew, so the Heineken Cup grew as well.

Along the way, nobody became better-versed in the art of winning Heineken Cup matches. Or of scrimping and saving bonus-point losses if a win was beyond them. Nobody played territory better or kept an opposition turning more.

One sodden night in Thomond Park back in January 2008, he captained an O’Connell-less Munster to beat Wasps and qualify for the quarter-finals by basically steering the game to his way of thinking as a jockey would a horse.

Shaun Edwards came in afterwards and said that if he hadn’t been in the Wasps dug-out all through the game, he would have stood up and applauded at times. On a night where nothing flash would have worked, he thought his way through to the final whistle.

“Heineken Cup is different,” says O’Connell. “You have those six pool games each year and Rog really knows how to play them. It’s a real strength of his that he’s very clever at playing cup rugby. He has that knowledge of when to kick it, when to run it, what to do at any given time. Obviously then kicking your points is vital in any game but particularly those pool games when you might be away from home and under pressure and each one has to go over.”

Everything points to this afternoon in Llanelli being one of those days.

Danny Barnes, Simon Zebo and Peter O’Mahony were all seven years old when O’Gara played his first Heineken Cup game. His halfback partner today, Conor Murray, had just turned eight. Every one of them can play, every one of them will contribute but O’Gara knows now more than ever the tenor and flow of the game will be down to him. For Munster to leave Wales this evening with anything, O’Gara will have to dictate matters.

Fourteen years after he first walked onstage, he wouldn’t have it any other way.