The last time Munster played Toulon away in the Champions Cup, two years ago this weekend, Simon Zebo was the red 15. Without a win in their opening two pool matches, Munster trailed 10-0 after 23 minutes and were skidding towards a ditch.
The airbag turned out to be a pair of tries. Zebo got the second. The creative credits were shared between the outhalf and the fullback, producer and director. Zebo spotted a thin peninsula of space behind the Toulon cover and shouted at team-mate Jack Crowley to kick. His sumptuous chip greeted Zebo on the first bounce.
Behind the try line Zebo was swamped by Munster players, but a photographer, Laszlo Geczo, got a clean shot of Zebo’s wild eyes and the rapture on his face.
Great photographs are never silent and Zebo’s roar is the soundtrack of the picture. His top jaw and his bottom jaw are frozen at full stretch, like a hippopotamus’s.
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As a player this was his shtick: flashes of lightning. “The brighter the lights the better I play,” Zebo had said in an interview before the game.
That was his 35th try in the Champions Cup, which put him third on the all-time list. It was also his last. By the end of that season his heart and his legs had reached a state of irreconcilable differences and Zebo retired.
“I would have liked to think that I could have played another year, but definitely not two,” Zebo says now.
“It wasn’t the matches. I could have played matches for another three years if it was just that. It was the weekly toll that was being taken. Getting to Saturday to play the match was getting harder and harder.”
In retirement, though, the bright lights didn’t go dark. Television was drawn to him. He had charisma and knowledge of an ever-changing game and he excited a response. Not everybody was attracted to his innate bubbliness and his naked Munster bias, but that was part of his magnetism too.
Television is competing for eyeballs in a bear-pit market. Broadcasters need pundits who can cut through the din. They can’t afford to serve lukewarm tea.
While he was still playing, Zebo occasionally turned up in a TV studio, but this season he has been a consistent presence on Premier Sports.
When Munster beat Leinster by 31-14 in Croke Park last October, Zebo’s first big outing for the station, his unbridled joy dominated the coverage.
When the game finished, he was unleashed with a roving mike to conduct post-match interviews, and he didn’t try to conceal his emotion or defuse his giddiness or hide the fact that he was talking to former team-mates.
What did viewers think? Nobody was ambivalent. Either you loved it or you didn’t. Before the match Zebo did a piece comparing the sides’ outhalves, Jack Crowley and Sam Prendergast. He expressed his marginal preference for Crowley with a series of cogent points that praised and criticised both players. But he made it clear how much he admired the Leinster 10.
“I just want to put it on the record, Sam Prendergast is an amazing player – because there are a few Leinster crybabies in my inbox,” he said with a laugh.
That segment was shared on Premier Sports’ social media channels and generated nearly 1.5 million impressions, an astonishing number compared to their whistle-to-whistle TV coverage of the match, which reached a peak audience of 78,000. For every broadcaster now, the battle is on many fronts.
“I’m always up for having a laugh,” Zebo says. “I want to bring that energy and just show as much personality as possible. I was never a big fan of the generic answers you were used to hearing over and over again.
“I’m not afraid to show my personality. People watching want the pundits to be genuine and I think people see beyond the BS when people put up fake personas or pretend to be super polished and not have any loyalties.
“I think if I was watching Man United and Man City I would want to watch people who have been in those changing rooms and understand the club, the culture, the history.
“If the pundit doesn’t have that energy or connection with the club then I don’t think you will portray the energy needed for the viewer to enjoy the game. That’s where I’d be at.
“I’m still trying to find my feet as well. I’m by no means any polished article. I’d love to be super comfortable, as if you were sitting down on the sofa with me watching the game. That would be the ideal scenario.
“At the moment, I’m trying to be as insightful as I can and have a bit of fun with it at the same time.”
Sky Sports gave up on the pretence of impartiality years ago. In their football coverage there will invariably be somebody in the studio with an affiliation to each club.
Rugby was slower to go down that road. Historically, the punditry has been more urbane, as if a game bound up with such complexity required laboratory analysis. There must be a middle ground.
When Leinster beat Munster by 13-8 in Thomond Park last month, Leo Cullen came to the post-match interview with a riff he had prepared about Munster having more Leinster ex-pats in their side than Limerick-born players. It was Cullen’s first television appearance as a stand-up.
Though his point was made for general consumption, he aimed it at Zebo, who all of a sudden was trapped at the bottom of a ruck, taking a shoeing from a man not wearing studs.
It was compelling TV and when Premier released it on their social media channels it attracted about a million impressions; their audience during their exclusive broadcast of the match had peaked at 163,000.
“I had to take my medicine,” Zebo says. “As he was slagging me, I was actually counting the amount of [Munster players] who came through Leinster and I was just like, ‘I’m going to have to bite my tongue here’.”
In the online world tongue-biting is not a skill much practised. “That’s always the case. I’m not afraid of them. I’ve had them all my life, don’t worry. You say things and you know you’re not going to please everyone. It’s being comfortable in your own skin and saying what you really believe anyway, regardless.”
As a player that was his manifesto too: he was true to his instincts. As a rookie on Ireland’s 2012 tour of New Zealand, and a bolter picked for the first Test, he was asked in a press conference what he thought he would bring to the team? “I like to run with the ball,” Zebo said. “I like to attack a lot.”
Even though he took a conventional path from Presentation Brothers College, through Cork Constitution to Munster’s academy, he successfully navigated the system without surrendering his individuality.
On parallel tracks during his teenage years in Cork, Zebo continued to play hurling with Blackrock, Gaelic football with St Michaels and soccer with Avondale United. All of it fired his imagination.
The hackneyed term for a player like Zebo would be “mercurial”, with all that suggests about unpredictability. That description is not always applied as a compliment.
Across all team sports the tension between structure and risk is greater now than ever, and that was where Zebo pursued his career: in the febrile space between instruction and instinct, between safe and hairy.
Zebo finished his career with 35 Ireland caps and the general feeling was that it left him short. When Joe Schmidt took over as Ireland coach he didn’t pick Zebo for the guts of a year. Schmidt was obsessive about structure and detail, and his successful Irish teams made very few unscripted movements.
And yet, 29 of Zebo’s caps came on Schmidt’s watch, and in the last two seasons before he signed for Racing 92, he made 20 appearances for Ireland, 15 as a starter. Schmidt wasn’t blind to Zebo’s charms, but ultimately the issue was trust.
When Ireland won the Six Nations in 2015, Zebo played every minute of the first four games until the last match against Scotland when he was omitted from the match day squad. That day, Zebo represented a risk that Schmidt wasn’t prepared to take.
“It’s kind of hard. Joe had a game plan and it was an incredibly successful game plan. He was an incredibly successful coach, so it obviously worked. But different styles can suit different players. That doesn’t diminish Joe or his ability, but it was just my style might have better suited to Rob Penney, when he was at Munster – he was amazing.
“And Rassie Erasmus as well – he was probably my best ever coach. He was the most incredibly detailed, inspirational man manager. He did everything – everything. He held the team to a standard like no other and he was by far the best for the culture around the club. He brought a family spirit to the club – he was amazing. You’d go to war for him any day.
“As soon as he left Munster we were all gutted because we knew success with him was on the horizon. We were all thinking, ‘He’s definitely going to win the World Cup with South Africa’.”
Moving to Racing 92 for three seasons in his late 20s ended Zebo’s international career in effect, but it satisfied his desire for adventure. The IRFU couldn’t match the offer on the table either. In 144 games in French club rugby, Zebo scored 60 tries. Racing 92 embraced the flamboyance and the risk.
“It suited me brilliantly. The style of rugby I enjoyed was the French style of play. You’d love to have been still available [for Ireland]. I would love to have been rewarded for my form while I was in France. But they were just the rules in place.
“I made my decision and I wouldn’t change that. In terms of experiencing the full journey [in my career] part of that was playing in the Top 14. That was very important to me. It’s something I look back on with enormous pride.”
Zebo settled back in Cork with his wife Elvira and their four children. All of them are playing the sports that he did as a child. His eldest son and daughter play on an under-11 rugby team in Cork Con that Donncha O’Callaghan coaches. They all go to the same school as Peter O’Mahony’s children.
Zebo plays five-a-side soccer with childhood friends who remained his best friends. His children hang out at Blackrock hurling club, just like he did at their age. His life in rugby went through so many cycles and returned him here, unharmed and unchanged.
O’Callaghan tells a story about being on a players committee in Munster when Zebo broke into the first team squad. Even in that giant playground Zebo’s lust for fun was outside the norm. Eventually, somebody on the player’s committee said the smile needed to be knocked off Zebo’s face.
Nobody ever managed it.
