RUGBY: GERRY THORNLEYtalks to the big Ulster flanker who despite previous World Cup disappointment and old knee injuries still has a smile on his face
FOUR YEARS ago in France one of the obligatory team occasions was a mayoral reception at which the players turned up in their dress suits. Aside from the speeches, the glad-handling with the corporate sector and dinner, World Cup caps were handed out.
“It had France 2007 on them,” recalls Stephen Ferris. “One of them was handed to me. I kinda looked at it and threw it in the bag as soon as I got back to the hotel and zipped it up. Didn’t even think about it. I hadn’t earned it.” Ferris was one of a quartet of Irish players in the 30-man squad who didn’t play one minute. He can reel off the names of the other instantaneously.
Another seven were limited to replacement run-ons. Finding it in his bag when he got home, he gave the cap to his mother.
“I hadn’t played in the World Cup. I’ve been to a World Cup but I haven’t played in one, so it didn’t really mean that much to me. To get to this World Cup is another great achievement, but to play in it is the next step.” Prior to RWC ’07, he had played well in the warm-up defeat at Murrayfield but was always managing his knee, which he had injured in Argentina that summer. He felt pain after every training session.
“It wasn’t a good place for me. But also not playing a minute, and the team wasn’t playing particularly well. I kinda knew from after the first game that unless somebody got injured I wasn‘t going to get a minute. There was me, Alan Quinlan, Brian Carney and Bryan Young – we never seen a minute, any of us. It was very frustrating, especially when the team wasn’t performing and maybe a shake-up would have helped things. But I put it down to a learning experience.”
He’s had a few learning experiences along the way, for there was the injury which curtailed his Lions tour in ’09 when set for a test starting place, though he maintains last January’s setback or not playing in the last World Cup was worse. At least he had played, and made an impact on the Lions tour, whereas the shoulder injury wouldn’t keep him out for the start of the following season.
Anyway, touch wood, he’s made this World Cup. Sitting down with the big man in the sunlit gardens of Carton House on the day the squad was announced, Ferris was a contented man. “I’m happy at the minute,” he said, with mock selfishness as much as relief.
He’d already had two operations on his knee when he injured it again last January in Ulster’s final Heineken Cup match away to Aironi. That night, he and his team-mates celebrated Ulster reaching the quarter-finals for the first time in 12 years, and the doctors were originally not concerned about the injury.
“I was probably going to miss the next week and fingers crossed after that. But then a week turned into two weeks, two weeks turned into a month, a month turned into three months, and it’s been six-and-a-half months.”
It’s remarkable to think that, at 26, Ferris has won only 25 caps. Having made his debut against the Pacific Islands in Ireland’s last game at the old Lansdowne Road in November ’06, he first had knee surgery after tearing his cartilage in his third test in Argentina in the summer of ’07, a second followed after the tournament to correct lingering pain and cue the third at the end of last season.
“I’ve only had two weeks’ holidays this year,” he notes. “Everybody thinks when you’re injured you’re on holiday the whole time but trust me you’re in more than everybody else.” His pre-season began before everyone else, even though his contact work was behind everyone else.
Training on his own over the summer was, he says, “mind-numbing at times. But Jonathan Davies up at Ulster understands every player and I’m good mates with him, so he did a lot of running with me and got me back into shape.”
He admits he began thinking about life after rugby more than he ever before but nonetheless was pretty sure he’d make the World Cup. “I knew, at the back of my head, that if I had another setback that was going to be it, that I wasn’t going to make the World Cup. But all the doctors and physios, all understood where I was at, and it’s been great, fantastic.”
All the while too, the rumour mill had gone into overdrive. Word was out that Ferris hardly had a ligament left in his knee and would be retiring any day now. He heard them too from Belfast to Dublin.
“And Cork,” he says, laughing. “People texted me from Cork and Limerick: ‘ah Stevie, I hear you’re retiring at the end of the season’. I’m like: ‘please, please’. But at the end, thankfully, I’m in good nick.”
Regardless of injury woes, Ferris has always seemed to wear a smile on his face, turning up to support Ulster in their big games, regularly giving good-natured soundbites and interviews in support of his team-mates and Rory McIlroy, and always appearing to be innately optimistic and upbeat.
“It’s not an act at all. I just have to keep positive about everything. People said ‘ah Stevie Ferris is done . . . he’s no cartilage in his knee . . . he’s only going to last another year’ whereas in my head I was saying: ‘I’m going to get fit. That’s another seven months onto my career. I’m going to improve next year. I’m going to get bigger. I’m going to get stronger’.
“And I’ve made significant gains in the gym. Because I haven’t been playing rugby I’ve been putting so much time and effort into everything else to make me a better player.”
You ask him where he gets his positive outlook from, his parents (Linda and Robert), his older brother (David), his mates, his schooling? “I’ve had a very happy upbringing, not too many traumatic times in my life, and I’ve been very lucky. I was out of school at 16 and went to college, to study for 18 months and then went out paving driveways, earning 60 quid a week from eight in the morning to eight at night, getting pissed on every day, working Saturdays and scraping pennies together to go out and have a few beers with your mates.”
“And now I’m in Carton House with 29 lads. We earn good money. We’re well looked after. We have our own hotel rooms. We drive nice cars. I’ve got good family around me and I just count myself very, very lucky. It’s hard to put my finger on it. I haven’t actually sat down and thought about it.” You’re privileged? “Yea, I am.”
He didn’t come the traditional school route either. He studied Leisure and Recreation, or Sports Science, but, as he puts it, “studying wasn’t really for me. I’m not an academic really,” he says smiling, “but I went to a really good school.”
From Maghaberry, Ferris went to Friends School Lisburn, where Barney McGonigle was his schoolmaster. Even so, it was only when McGonigle tipped off Allen Clarke and he invited him to play for Ulster Youths that his career began to take off.
Along the way, there have been good times too, not least being a force of nature in the 2009 Grand Slam success en route to being picked for the Lions. That Slam ought to give the squad a belief going into this World Cup which they’ve never had before.
“Deccie put us on a slide show this morning with three mountains,” reveals Ferris. “Nearly 95 per cent of the lads have climbed the first two of those mountains. All that is left now is Everest, or the World Cup, and I thought it was a great way of showing what we had achieved and what we can get to. We have plenty of winners in our team as well as plenty of experience along with the useful boys who are coming through.”
As defeats go, for Ferris personally last week’s 26-22 loss to France wasn’t the worst of his career. The best part was actually the warm-up, after being told he was coming on early in the second-half. “Every stride you were taking there was somebody saying: ‘good to see you back.’ You want to turn around and go ‘cheers, cheers’ but you can’t, though I kinda was inside my head. It was good to get all the support, and a lot of people have been behind me over the last seven months so it was good to get back out there.”
He threw himself around with his customary force and fearlessness. “I wasn’t even thinking about my knee which is probably a good thing. I walked on to the pitch for the first 20 or 30 metres because I wanted to take it all in. It felt like a first cap again, and then got into it.”
Starting today was sooner, in truth, than either he or Declan Kidney and planned, and it’s not exactly a nice and easy one, even if heretofore Ferris has been fortunate enough to be on the winning side every time he’s played against them.
“They’re a good side. They’ve shows over the last few weeks that they can raise their game, and I thought against Wales In Cardiff they were unlucky a few times. We need to get a win before we go away and that’s the most important thing. Last week the first 20 minutes were unbelievable and the last 20 were very good but we’re going to need an 80 minute performance to beat England.”
He feels fresh and has the confidence that comes with a “serious” amount of miles on the clock and feeling stronger than ever in the gym. While others have been losing their fighting weight, Ferris, though you’d hardly think he needed it, has put on another three kgs.
“In all the training I’ve been doing over the last six months, Johnny Davies has been in my ear every week, every training session telling me ‘there’s no reason why you can’t be the best backrower in the World Cup. There’s absolutely no reason. You proved it in previous tours, with the Lions.’”
“So every time I stepped out the front door to go training, it was all geared toward being the best backrower in the World Cup. I want to bring my physicality and presence to the game and hopefully that will take us to getting a few wins and maybe winning this thing.”
