ENGLAND v IRELAND: DENIS HICKIEpays tribute to former team-mate John Hayes, who earns his 100th cap today
IN LATE May, 1998, 34 Irish players met up in the Glenview Hotel, Wicklow, to embark on what was to be the last of the old-style Irish rugby tours. Unlike the modern, three-Test-then-home version, the tour to South Africa in ’98 had seven games in all. We played on Saturday and then again on the Wednesday for three weeks straight, finishing off with what turned out to be two of the most violent Test matches in Irish rugby history. Despite our poor results, the tour provided me with some of my best rugby memories.
The touring party was coached by the recently installed Warren Gatland and managed by Donal Lenihan. Included in the tour party were several uncapped players. Rob Henderson, Derek Hegarty, Justin Bishop, Bernard Jackman, Trevor Brennan, David Wallace, Des Clohessey and John Hayes. I had played with, played against or at least heard of all bar Hayes, who had only taken up the game a few years earlier and was in his first full season with Shannon’s First XV.
Hayes, Henderson and Hickie sat on the same row of every plane journey the Ireland team made during those four weeks so I got to know both lads pretty well. The three of us continued this seating arrangement when John was selected for his first cap in 2000. Eventually, with Hendo suffering several injuries coupled with the emergence of Kevin Maggs, Hayes and I were to spend most of the next seven years winding each other up on the team plane journeys, obviously with me shoe-horned into the seat beside him.
To pass the journeys we’d exaggerate the fact that, on the face of it at least, we couldn’t have been more different. While pretending to read the Irish Independent farming supplement, I’d launch into a well rehearsed speech about the best tractor on the market being a “David Brown” not a “Massey Ferguson”, in between offering to give him a left-wing’s perspective on how to “lock down the scrum” on the tighthead side if ever he needed it – much to his amusement, of course. He’d retort with enquiries as to what colour my boots would be for the coming match and what type of latte I enjoyed most.
He has only ever greeted me with the phrase “Hickie, you Fancy-Dan!” when we met at squad sessions. Some Limerick wit had shouted it at me during a World Cup warm-up match against Romania in 2003 and I had complained to Hayes after the game that even while playing for Ireland, the Thomond crowd couldn’t resist giving it to me in the neck! It was my sense of mock-outrage and not the nickname he found so hilarious and he never let up on it throughout my career.
On the long journeys back from subsequent Ireland summer tours to the Southern Hemisphere, when every other player would be looking forward to relaxing in the sun or playing golf for the following three weeks or so, Hayes had other ideas of what relaxation truly meant – working the family farm for three weeks solid.
Things got even worse in New Zealand following the Lions tour in 2005. On a flight from Wellington to Auckland, as everyone was sprinting to catch a plane out of the country following 10 weeks in the New Zealand winter, John casually mentioned to me that this year he was doing something different for his holidays. Instead of his usual stint on the farm, he was planning to head back down to freezing Invercargill – next stop Antarctica – to revisit friends he had made when Shannon sent him to New Zealand as a 20-year-old to learn his trade as a prop.
Although no angel on the pitch, he was liked by his peers off it. He is also a great family man. Twenty four hours after Munster’s second Heineken Cup win, while his team-mates were getting ready for their homecoming in Limerick, I rang his phone to congratulate him on his success only to discover John was already back in Nenagh providing the entertainment at his daughter’s birthday party. Needless to say, he was nowhere to be seen either at Ireland’s Grand Slam reception in Dublin, driving home early instead to his daughter Sally and his wife Fiona as thousands went in the opposite direction to get a glimpse of the team.
However, for all his individuality, John Hayes has always been the ultimate team player. His consummate professionalism, tactical awareness and appetite for hard work are only equalled by his humility. Contrary to some of the begrudging comments I have heard about him throughout his career, (much of it from people with zero caps) it is no accident he finds himself becoming Ireland’s first player to reach the 100-cap holy grail. In an era when every player’s duties to a team extend far beyond his primary role, he has consistently delivered.
While obviously occupying opposite end of the rugby spectrum to Brian O’Driscoll, who is one cap behind him on the Ireland all-time list, most players who have played throughout the last 10 years would say his ever-presence on the team has been just as critical to Ireland’s achievements as that of Ireland’s most successful captain, albeit in a very different way.
Quite simply, anyone who thinks Ireland could have enjoyed the successes of the past era without John Hayes is wrong and does not understand the nature and demands of a team sport like rugby.
Leading the team out and having to take centre stage on Saturday is probably the last thing John wants to do. However, his team-mates will insist, so as ever, he will put the team first and just get on with it. Putting the team first comes more naturally to John then perhaps any player I have ever played with and it is perhaps that singular trait, more valuable then any amount of caps he has earned, that marks him out as one of Irish rugby’s true greats.
