Ryan's a 10-year overnight success in the making

Nothing has ever come easy in rugby for the Munster and Ireland player. And he wouldn't have it any other way, writes GERRY THORNLEY

APPROACHING THE end of his one and final year at St Munchin’s, Donnacha Ryan, his father Matt and his mentor from Nenagh RFC, Pat Whelan, sat down to decide on the young man’s rugby future. Was it worth giving it his all, and if so they needed to devise a short- and a long-term plan. As they all suspected, there and then, nothing would ever come easy for Donnacha Ryan, and so it has proved.

They all knew his would be a circuitous route, not the elite schools/academy direct entry. Then 17, he decided he’d give it everything until he was 25. In the event, he was 26 by the time he won his first cap, though by then he’d made it as a professional.

Finally though, having turned 28, you sense that no one appreciates being at Twickenham today more than Ryan. Last Saturday marked his 17th cap, but it was his first Six Nations start, and on Tuesday, he put pen to paper on his first international contract to remain with Munster. A 10-year overnight success story.

Born in Nenagh, hurling, Gaelic football, swimming, golf, you name it, were his sporting passions; with rugby far off the radar until he was 17 and only then as a means to bulk himself up for his preferred ambition of cutting it with the Tipp minor hurlers. He played with Nenagh Éire Óg and, in the event, he made the Tipp minor footballers.

There was no rugby in the family bloodline either, though there was considerable sporting prowess. His mother started up a swimming club in Nenagh, while his father Matt played hurling for Limerick and Laois.

“It’s kind of embarrassing when you see the (Ireland-Scotland) programme the last day and ‘who’s your role model?’ and I’d say John Leahy (Tipperary hurler) but probably it would have to be dad, although that would be embarrassing for him. He would have been a tough hurler, a tough full back. He would have been very good.”

Ryan attended Nenagh CBS until his Leaving Cert year, when he went to St Munchin’s College. “I was trying to make the Tipperary minor team. I was too skinny so I took up rugby because I’d heard from school mates it could help me get bigger.” He had only taken up rugby the season before, and readily admits: “At the start the contact was a bit alien.”

During the World Cup he felt embarrassed when asked in his media duties of his early World Cup or Irish memories, for he didn’t have any. The first rugby match he can recollect watching was only a dozen years ago, when his dad turned on the TV for the Munster-Saracens game when Keith Wood burrowed over for his late try and you-know-who landed the tricky conversion for a one-point win.

But that, perhaps, fermented a dream of playing for Munster. He was, he reveals charmingly, given a crash course in rugby by Whelan with the aid of “subbuteo men”. Whelan works with most of the Nenagh underage sides, and also kick-started the careers of Barry Everitt and Trevor Hogan.

Whelan worked in health and safety, and amongst his seemingly manifold attributes, can fix televisions, while he remains a mentor for Ryan still. “I wouldn’t be playing rugby but for him. Definitely.”

Whelan would always focus on what Ryan describes as cognitive behaviour, and help to alleviate Ryan’s frustrations and self-doubts on his late developing path. “He’s always slagging me that I should get rid of those head maggots, as he calls them.”

For all Ryan’s natural athleticism, he recalls conceding seven penalties for Munster Youths in a trial match against St Munchin’s – by half-time! “They didn’t even use me in the lineouts, because I was a danger to myself.”

He gave away eight the next day, but Whelan threatened to leave the Munster Youths set-up if his protege was dropped. Within a few months of taking up the game with Nenagh, Ryan was on the Irish Youths team.

“I can safely say now vanity at the time got the better of me and I thought ‘this rugby mullarkey is handy’. And then I went into schools and got brought down to reality which was great. It showed perfectly that rugby is an unbelievable leveller.”

After winning a Munster Schools Senior Cup alongside Damien Varley and others at St Munchin’s, Ryan sat down with his father and Whelan. Ryan was about to attend UCC. “My proudest moment is getting an honours degree in UCC, whatever about rugby. It was four years and I turned down a full contract to finish it.”

But, deducing that he “wasn’t a big fish”, he opted for Sunday’s Well, especially as it offered one-on-one coaching with Murray Kidd. But when Kidd moved on after a year, so too did Ryan, who joined UCC, then coached by Ian Sherwin in AIL Division Two.

Once in a while Ryan would “sneak back” to play hurling for Éire Óg, his dad once cajoling him to appear as a second-half replacement against Moneygall when they were short – his dad just happened to have packed his son’s gear in the car boot.

Scoring with his first touch, his exploits were mentioned in the Nenagh Guardian, which Sherwin happened to read.

It was decision time for the last time. Hurling or rugby? Rugby won out, though he harbours a notion to hurl for Nenagh one day again. “If the body is still in one piece, when I’m finished, maybe Junior C or something.”

Even his parents have long bought into Ryan’s rugby career, and the social scene that goes with it, while his three older sisters, Joanne, Isabel and Emma, all live in London, travel to Wales for Rabo games and will also be at Twickenham today.

A memorable highlight at UCC was playing against a stellar Trinity team including Jamie Heaslip. “We had Jeremy Manning and Denis Hurley but they (Trinity) were just amazing. They hockeyed us.” But games such as UCC-Trinity, with the young talent on view, invariably drew interest and having seen Ryan play, Alan Gaffney called him in to Munster training sessions. Ryan freely concedes he is another late developing rugby player who wouldn’t be here were it not for the club game.

After graduating from UCC, Ryan had a choice between Garryowen and Shannon. The Garryowen men had made a persuasive and polished case to Ryan junior and senior about joining the Dooradoyle club. “Then we went to meet a guy called Pat O’Connor who has, Lord rest him, passed away. The two Garryowen lads were in suits. We met in the bank. Then I met Pat O’Connor in Schooners down by the Clarion, and he came in covered in shit and a pair of wellies and was about 20 minutes late and he says, ‘well, look we want you and sure look, you can come to us. Either way we’re going to win the league with or without you so it would be nice to have you’.

“And he went out on the phone for a second and Dad just said I like this mentality, he says ‘yeah we’ll sign’. There’s no point in looking for things. It’s all about the big picture, making a career out of this.”

And by the time he’d finished college in UCC, Ryan knew one thing. He’d love to be a rugby player. Coming from UCC’s more structured environment, Ryan revelled in what he calls the player-driven culture at Shannon, feeding like a sponge off players such as Colm McMahon, Eddie Halvey, Mossie Lawlor and “loads of others”.

In the 2007-08 season, Ryan was closer to the Munster action, but not close enough. He appeared twice as a replacement in Munster’s second Heineken Cup success, but was an unused replacement in the final in Cardiff against Toulouse. “I’ve a Heineken Cup medal at home and it means nothing to me,” he admits candidly.

There have been breakthrough moments, but this looks like his breakthrough season? “I don’t know. It’s a bloody slog, to be honest with you. My sister said to me ‘if you ever want to write a book you should just call it ‘The Hard Slog’ or something like that. ‘Life on the Bench’, I was going to call it! Or the ‘Twenty Minute Man’ or something!”

But his slog keeps him grounded. A week after last season’s Six Nations game in France, when he came on for the last quarter, Ryan did his shoulder. During rehab with Denis Leamy they resolved to make the World Cup, and with the help of a Magners League final “probably the biggest game I’d played at that point”, he and Leamy both made it.

“Loads of guys might have motivation videos or have things that might inspire them. The real dark days are the days that motivate me. I think ‘bloody hell, I’m going to make sure this is going to be worth it’. I know that sounds maybe clichéd but I definitely have heard every letdown in the books and that’s no disrespect to any coach. You try to change perception. You’ve just got to get on with it and get ready for a time when you may be called upon.”

Back in November 2008 Ryan made his Test debut as a 76th-minute replacement at Croke park in the grim arm wrestle with Argentina. The previous Tuesday he had been part of the understrength Munster side that famously extended the All Blacks. He loved the build-up and the “emotional rollercoaster”, the four Munster Kiwis enacting the Haka the night before the game for their team-mates and explaining its meaning, meeting and receiving their jerseys from the 1979 Munster heroes.

Ryan also took a full part in the celebrations, on both the Tuesday and Wednesday, and it was during the latter that he received a call telling him Alan Quinlan might be suspended and that he might be called up to the Irish squad.

He was at Limerick train station at 6.30am with his Munster kit bag and feeling “a bit worse for wear”, learned the new lineout calls and trained “poorly” on the Thursday before Quinlan’s appeal was rejected on the Friday. When David Wallace went down injured, Ryan was called aboard in green for the first time. “You just don’t want to let anybody down. I would have preferred the secondrow, but it was great.”

Last week was altogether better, but by Tuesday he’d cast it aside. Having once seriously considered moving to Northampton, and having recently been coveted by Leinster, he was signing his first international contract. Now it’s England at Twickenham on St Patrick’s Day.

“Yeah you’ve a lot of dark days, a lot of times you think ‘should I leave or whatever’. But this week’s there’s a challenge you want to have. Their confidence is running high but make the most of it while you can really and leave nothing out there.”

Mention of Mike Ross’s comparatively tortuous, late developing journey and Ryan apologises for interrupting. “There’s a guy now, sorry for cutting across, that I have ultimate admiration for.” Ryan recalls playing for Shannon against a Cork Con years ago with Ross at tighthead and wondering then why he wasn’t playing with Munster.

“There’s a guy who has the ultimate determination. I haven’t really said it to his face but great perseverance, doing the hard road and obviously there are a lot of dark days but everything that you do is built on self-belief and what sort of an attitude you have. There may be more talented players but you have to have the same determination and have to persevere as well.”

With determination, anything is possible indeed, even if you’re a late developer who didn’t come through the schools/academy route. “You’ve got to have a different template to those type of guys.”

Donnacha Ryan could, of course, be talking about himself.