Still watching from the wings

No apologies: these are a fan's notes. For who, after all, could not have been a follower of the bittersweet story of loss and isolated splendour? Could anyone with even the faintest love for sport not have been captivated by the streak of genius that shot through Irish rugby during the bleak years? It was not quite an era, being much too headlong and elusive for that. But it was a rush.

What do you remember best? Maybe it is the blond hair. Or the rebel yell he allowed himself after racing past Tony Underwood at Twickenham for that try. For you, perhaps, it is the tackle against Lomu, haring across to the far wing, all limbs and fire as he launched himself at the pistons of a colossus. And you, possibly, recall an outsider, a lonesome figure on the wing, waving for the ball, calling, calling. And then, what used we call it . . . the buzz of the stadium whenever the ball fell his way.

Flashy words summed him up back then.

"The Bombshell" to the headline writers.

"A free spirit" to his team-mates.

"Uncoachable," cried Neil Bennett, his former school trainer at St Edmunds.

"One of the best prospects in the game," oozed David Campese in the torrid summer of 1995.

A broody sort too. Distant was the word. Perhaps the trouble over the jersey lurks in your mind, some anger after he volunteered that he had thrown it on the floor after another loss. Oh, there were rows all right. Frustration, verbal and etched on his face as he stood with the huddle under the posts, awaiting another easy conversion. Maybe you remember his frantic energy as a jolt back to the bad old days. Or possibly it was the litany of injury tales that strikes a chord. It seemed the man was cursed by the heavens in the last days. The name is still fresh and yes, you recall the thrill of seeing him play but also that by the time you realised he may not be coming back, he had all but disappeared.

"In many ways," says Simon Geoghegan now, "I think I left the same way as I arrived."

Fleet Street pulses with Friday lunchtime giddiness. The promise of the weekend is falling sweetly over London. This hive of suits and perfume has been Geoghegan's working habitat for almost a decade. The capital is home now. In this life, he is a partner at Roslyn King solicitors, busy, thriving, City-sharp. To us, he is, at 32, still recognisable, with the blond look and the coiled athleticism. But hasn't he moved inexorably beyond his Lansdowne incarnation? Distance, after all, was his speciality.

Four years ago, when his feet betrayed him, didn't he just pack up his sport, the Irish days, the talent, and pull on a starched shirt? Didn't he move on with the same old fearlessness with not so much as a glance back? Well, yes. Sort of. Or, perhaps not.

"I think I just needed three or four years away from the game. It was very difficult for me to accept that my rugby career was over and I dealt with it by leaving the game completely. Couldn't watch it, read about it. "And work began to get busy so I was involved with that. Problem was that my firm had a box down at my old club in Bath and I had to go there sometimes with clients. It was difficult but I couldn't really refuse."

So that's where he was on some Saturdays of his post-career, sipping cocktails and not watching some alien wearing his jersey. And sometimes grimacing as a dart of pain shot through his feet. Geoghegan's final injury seems too delicate to belong to one who excelled in such a physical sport.

Nine operations failed to rid him of the arthritis in his toes. They pared so much bone away that his big toes are now the smallest on his feet. "The only comparable thing is that it generally affects, like, 70-year-old women," he says, as if in disbelief.

"Lineker (Gary) had the same thing. It happened because I was quite rigid, never very flexible. And we didn't have a clue about proper stretches then either."

It was after a league game against West Hartlepool that he found himself looking into his soul.

"I was back from operations in America and I just knew. Could play 30 minutes and not walk properly for two days. I just knew. It was gone."

Puff! Thanks for your time son. At 28, there he was, an ex-player left with the distant roar of the crowd and a hefty medical bill. Neither Bath nor the IRFU provided funding for the operations.

"I paid out 25 grand, mate," he reflects now. "The IRFU just washed its hands of me. I went to them asking them to pay and they said they had to have a meeting that couldn't take place for a month. That was a joke to me. So I went ahead and paid thinking once I was back, I'd be in a position to say, well . . .

"You must remember, it was the time of the Lions tour, which I was supposed to be back for. I just wanted to play. It never crossed my mind I wouldn't be coming back."

There was one occasion, when the hurt of not being a player anymore was still raw, that he broke his cathartic exile from the game. He stood in the crowd in Lansdowne Road to see Ireland and Australia.

"Went by myself. Went to see Jimmy Staples play."

He owed his old friend that. Geoghegan and Staples shared more than just English accents. The London boys were idealists, perfectionists who were caught in the last great roar of amateurism. They were out of time. Geoghegan harboured this fierce ambition to be, quite simply, "the best in the world".

"I think some people thought I was aloof. It wasn't that, I was just singleminded. I enjoyed a laugh as much as anyone but I was conscious of this desire to improve and it sort of ruled the social side out for me."

He tells of one training weekend when half the squad went on a blow-out on Leeson Street and found their way onto the news pages. Noel Murphy ran them round the field the next morning, "till we dropped", laughs Geoghegan. "I was okay, I hadn't been out, but some of the fellas were burnin' oil, stinking of booze."

Such memories warm him now. The Irish days were a mixed bag. Let's flick through these news pages, some eight years old. We are on the sports section of the Sunday Independent, days after the Irish were crucified in Murrayfield in January 1993.

There's Geoghegan, pictured in training gear in some dismal London park. The sportswriter David Walsh spent the evening with him and watched as the youngster ran eight 200 metre sprints at 40 second intervals. No coach, no adviser, no real clue. Disillusioned and angry, Geoghegan spoke as he played, with crystal fervour. He queried the team's fitness. Said he knew they couldn't win. Told of how he dropped his jersey to the floor and how, hauntingly, the Scottish second row Damien Cronin retrieved it. Cronin would later hand it to Derek Stark, Geoghegan's opposite number.

"I remember it," smiles the Irishman now. "Should have kept my mouth shut. I didn't slag any individuals off, it was more an attack on the system. Naivety really - I was young, wanted to lash out. I think it highlighted the truth of what was going on but some of the lads probably resented me saying it. And I shouldn't have said it, in retrospect. Your team-mates are your team-mates."

He vaguely remembers the furore that followed, "getting suspended for one training session or something ridiculous like that. But yeah, Noisy (Noel Murphy) had a real go at me."

The boy has a wild streak, muttered some. A loose bloody canon.

Today, the bombshell, the blond wonder, the flying winger, is a born-again rugby fan. He is in a crowded lunchtime bar, talking excitedly, sounding like anyone. Last year in Paris moved him. He watched the win from his house in Paddington.

"It was beautiful. And the thing was, I'd gone over there so often and we'd been walloped. It was impossible to ever see it happening. So what Brian O'Driscoll did that day raised the hair on the back of my head. "We are doing so well now. O'Driscoll, Hickie, O'Gara . . . we have to get as many of them in the Lions team as we can. Those boys are stars."

And wouldn't he love, if life were kinder, to be out there with them now, the distinguished statesman, with record tries perhaps?

"Probably not," he laughs. "Too much like work.

"But, yeah, one of my few regrets is that I didn't get 30 more caps for Ireland. I could still be playing, it was all I wanted to do. Lansdowne was my favourite place in the world and the Irish people were always so good to me. "I remember scoring a try against England and just sort of raising my arm as I ran back to the south terrace. And all these people just started going crazy. Those are the things you never forget."

He is a treadmill merchant these days, mortal like the rest of us. Just to compensate for the few beers. There was a blue period when he miserably fixated on all that he hadn't achieved in rugby. Now he can offer a more sanguine appraisal of his career.

Try taking those back-to-back wins against England away. Or that magical "nearly" afternoon against Australia in 1991. Or the thrill of facing down Underwood or Patrice Lagisquet or the great Campese.

"I look at it now as a period in my life which was a privilege, something that I was really lucky to have experienced. And I like to think that people know that whenever I played, I gave it everything."

He says he will start going back to internationals more now. Sometimes he yearns to just meet up for drinks with the old boys. It's funny, but there is a tinge of conservatism about the revolutionary now. He worries for youngsters in the professional era, about "the lack of altruism in the game." Every day, he feels blessed that he had a legal career to resume, to throw himself into.

Just don't think he ever forgot. Long after his locker was emptied at Bath, a bag of envelopes arrived from the club. Fans' notes, and he still has them. Unopened. Those so-longs are for some future day.

"You must understand, it was very difficult for me to accept what was happening for a long time. I had to cut myself off."

In a way, it was a separate life. Rugby has changed, moved light years from what it was in Geoghegan's day. Seems longer than four years ago.

Let's end at the beginning. His father was driving him to Dublin from his grandfather's farm in Galway. It was his first Irish under-21 session.

"We were in this van and there was all this straw in the back," he laughs.

"I think we were going back to England after the training, but I can't remember what the straw was for. So I got out at Lansdowne. Some of the lads were there and when I opened the side door of the van, all this straw fell out. Everyone was staring. Then I started speaking in this English accent and everyone just looked, as if to say, `Who the f*** is this f****** wierdo?' I just arrived from nowhere, got my boots out and said `How about a game?' And I left the same way."

He is creased over at the memory, a regular guy in a City lunch house. The strong words, the beautiful scores, the exhilarating speed, the anger, all tumble around amid the laughter. Simon Geoghegan never left us. It's just that he isn't around anymore.