SEÁN O'BRIEN INTERVIEW:NOBODY HAS it easy in the Irish squad, where the dice is rolled every day for those accused of various misdemeanours, and anyone who rolls a six has to draw from a deck of cards with all manner of potential punishments. Seán O'Brien has been getting a particularly hard time of it this week.
This is ever since O’Brien struggled to put on a replacement jersey during the first half against Italy in Dunedin last Sunday, amid a cacophony of whistling.
“I was trying my best to get it back on, that’s all I’ll say,” he explains. “I couldn’t get the back of it down. I got a good bit of stick off the lads for it.”
His punishment? “I have to sit for lunch and dinner with my top off for the next two days.”
Ireland’s answer to Sonny Bill Williams? “Jesus, I don’t know if I’d be able to do that either; the shape he’s in. I’d look well with tattoos on my white skin, wouldn’t I?”
Brian O’Driscoll reckons O’Brien has hired the same litany of advisors and agents as Sonny Bill, and was advised to go on to the pitch with his jersey already slightly torn. “Yeah, my posse thought it would be a good publicity stunt. That’s what I did.”
The posse includes his sister Alex and brother William, a couple of best friends, others from the club and ex-pats from Australia.
“Altogether, I’d say there’s about 100 people from Tullow. I’m not kidding. Between people who moved away or are over and back from the Carlow area, let’s say.
“Incredible.”
It’s also quite a tribute to his impact in the last year, winning a Heineken Cup, the European ERC Player of the Year, breaking into the Irish team, a stand-out player in the Six Nations and now again at the World Cup. Finding a quiet corner away from the huge media crowd in the squad’s luxurious Wellington hotel, you’re again struck by how self-assured he is.
“This is what you want. This is where you want to be, a place all of us want to be at the minute, and I’m no different. I certainly don’t want to be going home next week. And that’s the bottom line. It’s just a thing that you really want to achieve.”
He’s wanted it almost since he was 10, when he wanted to join Tullow but wasn’t allowed as he didn’t come from the parish, but rather Ballon/Rathoe.
“My father (Seán) took over that team, because me and my brother were playing on it, with a few other lads from around the area and entered a team in the Community Games. That’s how it all started. I went to Tullow the following season and stayed there until I was 18.
“At that age, it’s just your friends and the lads you’re kicking around a ball with every day, and going to school with, and it was very enjoyable at that age. It’s not much different now. I suppose these boys are all my mates now and we all get on very well and we have good fun together. That’s the way I think about it sometimes, only this is professional, and you can’t try all the dinks and chips I was doing back then,” he says, with a broad smile.
By the time he was 14 or 15 he was making breaks and scoring tries. “It was then I thought, Jeezus, I could be quite good at this.”
Friend and team-mate Martin Wall played in the centre and was, O’Brien says by way of a compliment “a bit of an animal; nobody could stop him either.”
But, unfortunately, Wall damaged his cruciate ligaments playing for Leinster Youths, which also serves to make O’Brien appreciate his good fortune.
By then, O’Brien had been picked amongst about 40 players from south-east Leinster for a couple of 30-minute trial matches against their counterparts from North Leinster, he can’t remember where.
“There were only two other lads with me from the south-east that day. Niall Cummins was one, he’s a secondrow, and Conor Mahon, a scrumhalf, and from Tullow as well. I was nervous, to be honest. I wasn’t really that excited about it. I was completely out of my comfort zone with a group of lads who had been playing rugby since they were old enough to hold a rugby ball, and they probably knew the game better in their heads. They were mostly from Dublin.
“But I just went out and did my own thing that day. It was more individuals that were picked out that day. We didn’t know each other or what each other was about. I just played my own game and got my hands on some ball, and made a few good tackles, and scored two tries, one in each of the games.”
This was also the day Richie Murphy first came upon O’Brien and earmarked him for the Leinster academy. The Leinster Youths won the interpros, promoting him to the Leinster under-18s (a mixture of youths and schools players) and the Irish Youths. He was part of the Irish team that competed in the Under-20 World Cup (won by the French hosts) and the under-21 team that won the Grand Slam.
Earning a scholarship at UCD through John McClean and a place in the Leinster academy were other defining moments.
“That really gave me an insight into what was expected of me. After a week or two I didn’t really know whether I’d be able for it. I remember Collie McEntee saying to me one day ‘Stick at it for a while and you’ll be grand’. Lads were way ahead of me in the first few weeks but I soon caught up.”
He made his Leinster debut against Cardiff Blues in September 2008 in the Celtic League and had a couple more appearances off the bench, but shone in the ensuing seasonal opener against the Ospreys and was man of the match against the Dragons the following week.
“That kicked off things for me.”
Unlike many from more established rugby backgrounds, O’Brien has an intuitive understanding of how to hold his depth and come on to the ball at pace or run support lines.
“I think it’s something we did a lot of in the Leinster academy, but a lot of that comes down to your instinct as well, of when to go and when not to go. When you’re on the move in a game it’s hard to know. ‘Am I running the right line here?’ You have to slow down or speed up or hit a hole when it’s the right time. I suppose that’s using your instinct, but it’s drilled into you at the academy and it’s still a thing every day when you go out training you remind yourself. ‘Keep your depth, keep your depth.’ You can never be too deep or too late on something.”
Larry Canavan, Vinny Mahon, Ger Kavanagh and Pat O’Keefe, the gang of four who looked after O’Brien’s underage Tullow team all the way through the ranks also deserve mention in his story. Along with his dad, and all the youths coaches he’s had, “they all had an influence on me, and were all very good to me. I can’t really say enough about all of them.”
O’Brien has formed a strong bond with room-mate and fellow flanker Stephen Ferris, a product of Ulster Youths rugby. Hunting in pairs on and off the ball, they look like they’ve been playing for years together. Yet today will only be their third Test together.
The mutual admiration is obvious, with O’Brien calling Ferris “a freak” in likening him to David Wallace. “He’s so powerful and he can really set the tone in a game with some of his big hits.”
They also instinctively push each other. “If Fez carries a ball I might carry the next one, or he makes a big hit, I’ll want the next one. I don’t think we’re thinking about it too much, it just happens. It’s not planned or anything. We both think the same kind of way about rugby.”
Allowing them the limelight, very selflessly, has been Jamie Heaslip. “Jamie’s doing more of the donkey work than he’s ever done, and he’s still getting his hands on a bit of ball as well. Jamie’s work-rate has always been phenomenal. I don’t know what people are really giving out about, to be honest with you. He’s working very hard and is a big part of this set-up. When it gets loose he finds himself in the right places all the time.”
“That’s the thing that kind of frustrates me a little bit. I get caught up in the first or second phase a lot and when the time comes that the game does get loose it’s great to have players like Fez and Jamie who can steal a ball as well. He (Heaslip) got four or five steals in the Australia game and that speaks for itself.”
Without a McCaw or Brussow type breakdown specialist, they have struck a good balance, eclipsing a Pocock-less Australian back-row and a very good Italian backrow. But the Dan Lydiate/Sam Warburton/Toby Faletau trio have also been tearing up trees.
“They’re young, they’re big and strong, and they all have different, good assets to their game. Sam is stealing a lot of ball in the last few games and he’s going to be a big threat to us, but they’re no different to our backrow. We all have different things and I think it’s going to be a massive battle. As it is in every game, the backrow battle now dictates a lot of the way a game goes.”
He’d just fielded questions from seven television interviews simultaneously and actually enjoyed the buzz of a World Cup quarter-final media day. He thinks of the 100 or so from home, and the many thousands before. “You have to be passionate about the support that’s over here . . . we don’t want to let them down either and that is a big factor.”
