PRO12 LEAGUE/JOHN HAYES'S LAST GAME:One of the most unlikely yet enduring careers in Irish rugby comes to an end on Monday. GERRY THORNLEYsets the scene for John Hayes's final game

TIME WAITS for no man and so one of the most unlikely yet enduring careers of Irish rugby comes to an end on Monday at Thomond Park when John Hayes appears for his 212th and last game for Munster, over 14 years after his debut. A Bruff diamond, a national treasure and, indeed, a legend, it’s unlikely we’ll ever see his like again.

The warmth for his farewell will undoubtedly add thousands to the attendance, for many will want to say thanks. No doubt he’ll hate the attention but, for once, he will have to take a bow. Notoriously publicity shy and low profile, Hayes famously missed the Grand Slam celebrations in Dublin to be back on the family farm in Cappamore, Co Limerick, where he and Fiona Steed, his Irish rugby-playing wife, have a newly-built home with daughter Rebecca.

It is not stretching things to suggest that, at 1.93m (6ft 4ins) and 128kg (20st 2lb), this bull of a man with phenomenal natural strength, was the cornerstone around which the rejuvenation in Munster and Irish rugby was founded.

His career neatly encompasses the rejuvenation in the club game, where he was part of the all-conquering Shannon team of the late 1990s, and made his Test debut along with Peter Stringer, Ronan O’Gara, Simon Easterby and Shane Horgan, as well as the recalled Mick Galwey and Denis Hickie, for that rejuvenatory 44-22 win over Scotland in 2000.

Starting with that 9-8 loss to Northampton at Twickenham later that year, Hayes played in all four of Munster’s Heineken Cup finals, culminating in those 2006 and 2008 triumphs, and was virtually an ever present for Ireland throughout the remainder of the decade. Indeed, he played in 10 successive Six Nations campaigns, 55 consecutive matches in the tournament up until 2010, incorporating the Grand Slam of 2009.

Heaven knows how Munster and Ireland would have coped throughout that decade without him, and for this they both owe a huge debt to Shannon. From a farming family in Cappamore, the only sports he was ever introduced to were Gaelic football and hurling, with the local club and Doon CBS, alternating between full back and full forward as a gangly lad who’d reached his full height by 16.

“I wasn’t any good,” he maintained in one of those rare audiences we were fortunate to have with him. The lure had been watching Ireland in the 1991 World Cup and specifically the epic quarter-final with Australia. A germ of an idea had set in but even then, he admitted, he probably wouldn’t have wandered into Bruff RFC but for a friend, John O’Dea, bringing him to training one Tuesday evening when Hayes was 18.

His first game, the following weekend, is almost the stuff of legend, a celebrated 0-0 draw between Bruff and Newcastle West. “I can genuinely remember, and this is a fact, I hadn’t a clue,” he freely admitted. “I’d had two training sessions. I remember just running and not knowing what to do. I knew not to head the ball, but I wouldn’t have had a clue about half the rules. But I loved every minute of it, and going home afterwards knowing this was something I wanted to do. I couldn’t wait to get back on Tuesday night for training. I can remember that as clear as day.”

Legend also has it that Hayes was applauded off the pitch but he rather sheepishly conceded it was “just a few of the lads”. In any event, out of little acorns and all that.

The absence of an under-20 team at the club prompted a suggestion by Bruff man Willie Conway that the 19-year-old Hayes go up to Shannon. There he first came under the wing of Niall O’Donovan, the coach who guided him through Shannon, Munster and Ireland in turn, and whom Hayes credits as the most influential figure in his career. A couple of summers with Marist in Invercargill at the behest of a Kiwi, Kynan McGregor, who is now back in Bruff with his Irish wife, also helped.

“I kind of did a crash course in rugby. I played a year with Shannon, and then went straight down there. I started a club season there, returned in August for another season with Shannon, then I played another season down there and back again, so I kind of played four seasons together. It was a good crash course.”

New Zealand was the making of him in many ways. He bulked up and was converted into a tighthead by the Marist coach, “Doc” Cournane. “I was nearly 23 when I came back. I put on a lot of weight, and at the same time lineouts changed and lifting came in after the 1995 World Cup. I’d become too heavy to be lifted so I was changed to prop, and having learnt a bit from playing in the secondrow, I had to learn all over again. It was non-stop.”

Perhaps part of Hayes’ phenomenal popularity (a huge banner “go on Bull, ‘tis your field” decorates all Munster games) is that he is not the most naturally-gifted rugby player of all time. Rather what he has achieved has been largely founded on an unstintingly honest work ethic – coaches and fellow players have always lauded the human forklift whom Mick Galwey and John Langford admitted extended their rugby careers with his knowledge of lineout calls – which fans can thereby identify with. Rugby, and playing prop, also suits him psychologically.

“I think it’s a great position to play. Maybe it’s not the flashiest position on the pitch, and they all want to be backs or backrowers, but it’s an unbelievably important position. Sometimes if the game is close, and maybe it’s windy or wet, it’s just non-stop action, and it’s brilliant. You’re all stuck together and it’s ruck, maul or scrum after another.”

Another significant move was being surprisingly fast-tracked into the Ireland squad to tour South Africa in 1998 when, he admitted, he had to ring Anthony Foley to check J Hayes really was him and that there wasn’t a back by that name somewhere else in the country. Having been working as a welder up until that tour, a full-time contract soon followed. He has always realised how extremely fortunate he was that his own career coincided with professionalism.

“Suddenly work is gone. You’re just doing what you love. Fellas for years before us gave huge commitments to playing for Ireland, whereas we got to do it as a job.”

His longevity in part he attributes to starting so late, even if it meant he had to learn on the hoof and was a late developer, though he wouldn’t be the first prop who played his best rugby in his 30s.

“He has flaws in his game,” as Keith Wood once candidly admitted in an eulogy about his one-time Irish and Munster frontrow partner. Six feet four inches is not, and has never been, the height wished for at tighthead prop. To ask a player of that size to play at number three is an invitation to get mashed and Hayes has had his fair share of tough days. It is the most physically demanding position on the field and one of the most technical.

“In the scrum, the key element is the ‘hit’, that gladiatorial clash to take the strongest position in the frontrow,” continued Wood. “Hayes’s height puts him at a disadvantage and this is where he sometimes comes a cropper. If he is slow on the hit he can not get into a strong position and it is downhill from there. If he gets the hit right, a bulldozer would not budge him. This is a large margin of error and the source of all the flak he gets. Some of it is justified but most is misplaced.

“It has been convenient to pigeonhole Hayes as a bad scrummager and ignore the influence he has on the team. The simple truth is that it is rare for him to be under pressure for long. Never once has he let an odd bad scrum lead to his head dropping.”

Besides, his strengths more than made up for his flaws, and as Wood also wrote: “He is the best lineout lifter in world rugby, one of the best defending props and an awesome rucker. His standard has been incredible and long lived.”

In any event, all the criticism was water off a very large back, and he calmly accepts that some of it was justified. “I’d never tell you that I played brilliant every game.” That said, when he was called up as a late replacement for the last Lions tour, he came straight from the farm and when brought on as a replacement in the third Test, duly did something Phil Vickery couldn’t do, namely locked the first scrum and tamed The Beast, Tendai Mtawarira.

“I’d like to think I haven’t wasted all the time and effort for nothing,” he once said dryly.

Needless to say he has achieved far more than he ever imagined possible and has also played considerably longer than he would thought as well. A legend indeed.