Murray a mix of fearlessness and fancy feet

Scrumhalf Conor Murray's good footwork and ability to bring something different have marked him out from the start, writes GERRY THORNLEY

THE BACK pitch at Thomond Park in 2007. St Munchin’s College, the holders, are playing Castletroy College in a Munster Schools Senior Cup quarter-final. Conor Murray – an unused 16-year-old replacement when a team with Keith Earls as the try-scoring star turn beat PBC 7-3 in the St Patrick’s Day final on the main pitch at Thomond Park the year before – recalls being more nervous for the quarter-final than for any other game.

“It’s the first game and it is the one you talk about all year when you’re playing friendlies – teachers are building it up, and coaches, and it just got to all of us. We managed to win and stuff, so it was a great day, but huge pressure,” he recalled during the week.

Watching on the sidelines was Greg Oliver. The three-times capped Scottish scrumhalf, who was married to a Limerick girl, Fiona, had been invited over to coach Garryowen through Philip Danaher and with the Munster Academy. A year before, on a reconnaissance mission, Oliver took in a St Munchin’s game to run the rule over Murray at the behest of Garryowen Academy manager Tommy O’Brien.

“I could see an exceptional talent that day,” recalls Oliver. “His all-round ability was fantastic, his work-rate. We spoke to him afterwards, as his family’s club was Garryowen, and he was quiet when he first came to Garryowen, but he’s worked on that, like he has done with everything else. He’s always looking for that edge. He’s never content, and I’ve always liked that about him.”

The pressure, as usual, didn’t affect Murray too much. His third-minute penalty and a 15th-minute try set St Munchin’s on their way to a 13-11 win. He would open the scoring in the semi-final against CBC with a penalty as well, though CBC would win the match with an injury-time try.

Murray’s first sporting love had been for hurling and Gaelic football, in which he displayed obvious talent. The Patrickswell youngster had played in an under-12 blitz along with some friends at Garryowen, but hadn’t really taken to rugby, but all that changed after going to St Munchin’s. It was with the introduction to the Munster Schools Senior Cup that Murray really caught the rugby bug.

It was then, too, that Murray made the switch to scrumhalf. His prime motive was envy of a friend from his summer holidays in Derrynane in Kerry, Chris Nolan, who was a scrumhalf for CBC Cork and the Irish schools.

Trying out the basics of the position on the Derrynane beaches, he resolved to ask his coach at St Munchin’s, John Broderick, if he could make the switch. “I always liked the look of it,” says Murray. “It looked a fun position to play in – you’re involved a lot. I was playing on the wing and I was sick of not getting the ball so decided to move in, or go in and try out. I started to enjoy it and stayed there.”

This new-found specialist position must have required hours of painstaking practice? “Yeah. I tried to stop passing off my good side for a week and just do my bad side, messing around on the road with the lads. I hope I don’t have one [bad side] at this stage. It is a core skill, so there are no excuses if you get it wrong. It is just something that should not be talked about. It should just be at a high standard.”

Of Broderick, Murray says: “He was a great motivator and he is coaching Young Munster at the moment. I had him the whole way up through school and he motivated me and he told me about the types of players I would be coming up against from other schools.”

Murray went with Broderick to Young Munster for a year, although the way the coach explains it, the demands were more from the player. “He was and remains the most demanding player I’ve ever worked with,” says Broderick. “I promised him specialist coaching from two different types of coaches – Derek Tobin and Johnny Moloney – an ex-Irish schools scrumhalf. I also hired a specialist sprint trainer and a conditioning coach. But it was as much because Conor demanded it, and would go on demanding these sessions every week. He was as cold, clinical and analytical in what he wanted to improve in his game as anyone I’ve ever known.

“I told him that after playing some under-20 and seconds game he would be playing for the firsts by January,” adds Broderick, and Murray duly broke into Munster’s AIL Division Two team after Christmas. “They were a good pack to play behind, experienced and generally on top. But Conor transformed them and I can safely say we wouldn’t have won promotion without him.”

With that Broderick happily wished Murray well en route to Garryowen as the next, necessary step towards developing his game. Garryowen was the club where Murray’s grandfather Con Roche had been a Munster Senior Cup winner as a backrower in 1947. A year later Con, who passed away earlier this year, played for Munster against the Wallabies at Musgrave Park, and would earn a final trial, though never a cap.

It was in Murray’s two years at Garryowen and specialist sessions over three years with the Munster Academy that Oliver’s influence grew. “He’s been a joy to work with,” says Oliver. “He has a lovely family behind him and obviously has a good background. His mother was a good squash player, and you can see that natural ability. He glides when he runs, and just has the ability to do something different.”

Although Murray’s height – he’s over six feet – might be considered something of a technical disadvantage, Oliver points out that he has plenty of innate advantages for a scrumhalf. “I always look at their feet, and he’s got good footwork for a big boy, and I think that comes from playing a lot of different sports when he was young. It’s all relevant; if you play tennis or anything, even golf. His footwork was excellent, so I just had to tinker with him a wee bit. He has a lot of power coming through his hips and that comes from his transfer away.”

Oliver also lauds Murray’s approach. “I would blast him in some sessions and he’d be tired at the end of it, but he knew he’d worked hard, and he keeps on looking for more.”

Not alone does the ball travel through the air very quickly off both sides, but Murray’s pass also gives his outhalf more room. “He has got a lot of length in the pass. I’ve said to Tony in Munster that Ronan can move a bit wider, because it will get there. The ball doesn’t dip. He’s got a hell of a long pass, and you can use that, especially on the left-hand side of the scrum.”

In Murray’s first season at Garryowen, mostly as a 19-year-old, Oliver pushed Murray and a couple of others into Munster Junior Cup games. “I remember him playing on Sunday in Clonmel with Andrew Burke and Diarmuid McCarthy, along with Rob Laffan, who was 35. An 18- or 19-year-old playing in that environment is invaluable sometimes. He played in a few of those games and it stood him in good stead. Playing in Junior Cup rugby on a Sunday throughout Ireland, I think you get that hard-nosed edge, and not just up front. It’s a different environment. The pitch might not be great, and it makes them level-headed. If you don’t wrap them up in cotton wool they see a different life.”

Murray would start vying for a first-team place with the more established Gerry Hurley the following season, with both scrumhalves also assuming goalkicking duties, and Oliver remembers Murray’s AIL debut as a half-time replacement away to Terenure.

“He changed the game. He just sped up the game for us. You could see all the ways he could make an impact on the game; his speed in getting the ball away, he was always a threat around the base, he had just about everything.”

By last season, after almost three full years in the Munster Academy, two years of gradual progress at Garryowen and playing for the Irish under-19s and under-20s, Murray was ready. Although he made his competitive Munster debut as a replacement against Connacht in April 2010, and had made another four appearances off the bench last season against Australia and in the Magners League, he only made his first competitive start last March at home to the Dragons. He never looked back, starting all but two of Munster’s last 10 games, including both Challenge Cup matches, Leinster at home and the successful semi-final and final of the league.

By August he was almost a fifth-choice addendum to the scrumhalf pecking order in Declan Kidney’s provisional World Cup squad, but the first thing that struck you about his debut as a replacement against France in a Bordeaux furnace was his temperament. You forgot it was his debut. He looked like a veteran. Eoin Reddan, whose family are neighbours to the Murrays less than a mile away in Patrickswell, classily gave the young pretender his number nine jersey as a souvenir. Murray duly supplanted him during the World Cup. There’s gratitude for you.

Having become the first-choice Ireland scrumhalf at the World Cup, it’s easy to forget that after his first Heineken Cup campaign, this is his first Six Nations, although given he was first drawn to supporting Ireland when watching games from the family home during the 2003 World Cup, it’s also fitting.

“It’s doing it backwards, a lot of people say to me,” he admits with a smile, “but I think even just playing the provincial games and big games like that and then World Cup games, they’re all high-standard games and they don’t differ too much. Obviously the opposition is different and you have to approach them differently, but what you expect of your own game in those high-standard situations, that doesn’t change that much. So I’ve just been trying to get on with it and demand the most out of myself, really.”

Still less than a year on from that full Munster debut, Murray has played 23 times for his province – starting throughout his first Heineken Cup pool campaign, in which Munster won six from six – as well as seven times for his country, and will be making his fourth successive Test start today. Needless to say, those who knew him best weren’t in the least surprised. “It’s like anything else,” says Oliver, “if somebody gets a good run of three or four games and he gets used to that level, he gets into the mix of things. Fortunately for Conor and a few of the younger boys, they got a real crack at it and I thought Conor was ready for it even before he got a chance, because he was just going to bring so much to the game, and something a bit different.”

Meanwhile, Broderick kept telling Murray he would make Ireland’s World Cup squad, and now the sky’s the limit. Ireland have not had a Lions scrumhalf since Colin Patterson and John Robbie went to South Africa in 1980, in large part because Tomás O’Leary was sidelined after being selected in 2009, but in the intervening years Wales and England have had six each, and Scotland five. While you don’t want to accentuate the pressure on Murray, he ticks all the boxes to end that run.

“The big thing for me is that nothing seems to fluster him,” says Oliver. “In the last few games against the Ospreys and Wales, he stood up to Mike Phillips. He’s not afraid to mix it. He knows where the line is in terms of physicality. Nothing seems to bother him during a game. If he makes a mistake he just gets on with it. Nothing lingers with him.”

And nothing, it would appear, fazes him.