They were days when a draw against France sparked a desperate hope. Who knew what might be possible if we could just find a backline that scored tries on a regular basis? I had recruited a large group from our sixth year class at Pres Cork to travel to Lansdowne Road for the opening game of the Five Nations against France on January 20th, 1979. The exact date is important, as will become apparent in a few paragraphs.
Two players stand out in memory: a back-row forward and racing blur of blond hair who captained France, Jean-Pierre Rives, and a Munster fly-half, already a legend, Tony Ward.
Ward kicked three penalties and the French scored a converted try and a penalty. To us watching schoolboys, Rives and Ward represented improbable dash and glamour, players above the ordinary. We tramped off home, honour satisfied with the draw.
A scraped win or a draw or glorious defeat were our ambitions back then. England, Wales and France strutted through the Five Nations while Scotland and ourselves were reduced to occasional sparkling cameos. To paraphrase WB Yeats, an Irish rugby follower needed to keep about him an abiding sense of tragedy to sustain him through any temporary periods of joy.
The date of that game on January 20th, 1979, was important because on the following day there came bellowing into the world the most influential Irish rugby player of his generation and one of the greatest players in the history of the game. Brian O’Driscoll’s list of medals and honours includes a Grand Slam, Six Nations championships, a Lions captaincy, multiple Heineken Cup glories and much more.
To add to that he embodied an essential – but in Ireland often unfulfilled – requirement of a public figure: he didn’t make a show of us. He was articulate and thoughtful, he went home to his own bed at night, he didn’t start fights in pubs and he stood above the grubby politics that defined so much of the time.
Different Ireland
When the tidal wave of corruption and abuse scandals hit the country, BOD was one of those symbols we could look to for proof of a different Ireland.
His autobiography The Test is a thoroughly enjoyable read. It is a book that speaks of travels in many places but its roots are in Dublin, in the comfortable and secure world of his Clontarf childhood and the middle-class milieu of Blackrock College and later Leinster.
Yet reading his accounts of Irish rugby as it grew into the professional age, we are reminded of how O’Driscoll’s generation of Irish players took the game out of the private schools and into a much wider community, how those titanic struggles with Munster in particular helped to popularise a game that had for too long, with the exception of Limerick, been largely confined to an elite.
Throughout the book one is struck by the intensely tribal nature of club rugby in the professional age. Playing for Ireland may have been the ultimate honour but the club side were your blood brothers in the brutally attritional struggles of weekly sport. Thus it is Denis Hickie and Shane Horgan who emerge as his closest confidants, his go-to men in hours of crisis.
The relentless struggle with injuries, the fears over the future of his captaincy and – late in the day – the worry over his Ireland place are painstakingly documented here.
He is careful not to stray too far from the path of discretion. There is a telling paragraph early on: “If you stick around long enough and you do enough of the right things, you get seen in a largely positive light. It’s a nice way to have it because most of us are in some way sensitive about how we are perceived as people – but it can stifle you. Just a little, but enough to make you second-guess yourself every so often.”
To his credit O’Driscoll does not trade in dressing-room secrets. But I would have liked a little more insight into the relationships with players from outside the Leinster bubble.
Of the men from other provinces only Ronan O’Gara seems to emerge as a close friend. Paul O’Connell was a friend but also a rival for the captaincy, a super competitor in the same league as O’Driscoll himself. The Ulster contingent are largely absent as characters. But what role did they play in a squad where Munster and Leinster were such deep rivals?
Reading between the lines
Discretion is part of his nature. Still, I would love to know what he thinks of the likes of Gavin Henson, who infamously accused him of eye-gouging in the 2004 Ireland v Wales Grand Slam decider and who represents the polar opposite of O’Driscoll in terms of image and achievement.
There is a certain amount of reading between the lines to be done. The resentment of Warren Gatland over his exclusion from the final Lions test in Melbourne is muted here. The series victory, acknowledges O’Driscoll, was Gatland’s vindication. It hurt like hell but O’Driscoll is too fair-minded to deny the Kiwi’s skill as a coach and motivator.
Even when describing his feelings towards Tana Umaga and Keven Mealamu of the All Blacks he shows a degree of equanimity many would regard as generous. The duo ended his Lions tour of New Zealand with a hideously dangerous tackle that BOD restrainedly describes as “incredibly careless”. It was more than careless but the citing officer astonishingly thought otherwise.
Openly critical
In the Irish coaching set up
The Test
suggests his relationship with Eddie O’Sullivan was much warmer than that with
Declan Kidney
. The portrait of Kidney, who coached Ireland to a Grand Slam, suggests respect but distance. He was not a man to whom O’Driscoll warmed and he is openly critical of Kidney’s treatment of O’Gara at the end of his career.
It is in his account of his travails rather than his successes that we get close to the real O’Driscoll. His description of the trauma surrounding the suicide of his best friend Barry Twomey in 2008 is heart-wrenching.
In his co-author, Alan English, O’Driscoll has found a worthy collaborator. What emerges is a picture of a man acutely, if very privately, vulnerable to the multiple insecurities of top-level sport. On the field he was a ruthless competitor. In the pages of his book he comes across as a sensitive and relentlessly self-questioning man, the very antithesis of the boorish rugby stereotype of a not-too-distant age.
After reading The Test I warmed even more to O'Driscoll as a player and a man. He stood for a new ethos in Irish sport that refused to accept mediocrity or glorious failure. And in his so obvious human decency he reflected the best of our nature. For this as well as the glories on the pitch we owe him much.
Fergal Keane is a foreign correspondent with BBC News. In a much earlier life he was a rugby correspondent with the Limerick Leader and remains a devoted Munster and Ireland fan
