Keith Duggan on how Galway legend Eric Elwood is gearing himself for one hell of a swansong

'China' is the term he uses for everyone. When he walks up Shop Street in Galway city or around his childhood home of Mervue, Eric Elwood responds with a cheery "Howya, China" to the casual greetings he encounters. From steadfast citizens of the Claddagh to the skateboard generation hanging around the Spanish Arch at weekends, the whole of Galway knows Eric Elwood, The Eternal Rugby Player.

And he loves it because the sensation is not one of provincial celebrity. It is more like throwing on your favourite jumper even though it is paint stained and shapeless and ragged. Galway and Elwood are just a natural fit, locked into an easy relationship that seems to have been there forever. Elwood is a Mervue boy. He went to school in the Jes. Standing on the wall at the Galwegians rugby ground, you can see his house. "The bungalow on the right, at the bottom of the road."

His father is of Bohermore stock. His mother's people are from Cave, just beyond Clarinbridge. "A cottage right on the Atlantic, next stop Boston."

It is just 15 minutes from Eyre Square, but, to Elwood, it represented the heart of the country, the last outpost. It had no streetlights. He met Tara the evening he played outhalf for Connacht against the world champion All-Blacks. He was 19 and he was drinking pints with Grant Fox and was introduced to this girl who was also from Mervue. Seventeen years later, on a sunny, windblown Good Friday on the promenade in Salthill, he will describe it as "the best night ever".

They were kids and they chased an oval ball halfway around the world for a while knowing they would marry and gravitate back to Galway, sometime after Elwood pursued the half-mad notion of playing number 10 for Ireland. When that happened, they threw a big party for him in Mervue, with streamers and confetti. Galway city pulsed with such pride at his achievement that the tremors warmed the dark earth of the west. Elwood stood for what was possible for the outsider.

He came back home after a trip to the Hong Kong Sevens and so his neighbours planned the party and as he drove his car up past the Regional College he knew there was something fishy. He saw his old man loitering on the corner. Elwood senior claimed he was "out for a walk" and the son shot him that sardonic look, black eyebrows raised and a dubious curl on his upper lip. Tara was in on it and he tried to turn the car around. They wouldn't let him.

Everyone he knew was there and dozens he didn't. He was both touched and stricken with mortification, tongue-tied. The fuss made him sweat. The last thing he ever felt was special. But he was. He was an international from 1993 to 1999 and Warren Gatland, the doe-eyed, affable Kiwi who encouraged him to dream big enough when he was a teenager turned out to be the man who told Eric his number was up as well. The six years passed by in a blur. It all did.

From the old days of drinking in Moran's on the Weir before big Test games against the Southern Hemisphere giants in the Sportsground to his second life as a model, disciplined professional rugby player, it has just flown by for Eric Elwood. When John Fallon, an old acquaintance and a journalist who covered Elwood's games from the beginning rang one night last week, the conversation turned to retirement.

Elwood said this was his last season. The visit of Sale, with their array of superstars, would be his last grand outing at the Sportsground. John told him he was going to write the story and Elwood agreed, but wanted no fuss. Still when he was dropping the girls to school and getting a few messages down the town, the greetings were more emphatic. "Saw the story." "Sorry you're leaving." "Well done." "All the best, Ernie." "Thanks, China." He went home and read it and the details stilled him for a moment.

"I bet it's hitting home now," Tara said. And it was. Seventeen years? Where did they go? Eric Elwood is proof that time moves differently in Galway. Countless young bohemians have come to Galway with aspirations of producing great works of art or music only to discover it is a hard town to keep track of years or even decades in. It is the home of the eternal weekend and can be a fatally attractive place to do nothing.

Galway has always been a beacon for the artistic crowd, but it is also a city with a strong rural influence, with an Irish language tradition. The university has an enormous influence on the city, but it is working class in spirit, although the fishing heritage of the Claddagh is now remembered in sepia prints of women in shawls and brawny men sorting nets on hookers. It is a bookish town and a drinking town and a place where it rains a lot. It is a place with a lot of attitudes and opinions, all of which can be heard at the Galway Races, the traditional day out for all walks of life in the city.

Sport may be the sole common denominator in Galway and that is why someone like Eric Elwood has come to mean so much across the city. When he moved up to Dublin to play rugby with Lansdowne in the early 1990s, he took with him a fierce sense of locality allied to a natural confidence.

He was already half a legend around Galway, having made his debut for the county footballers in 1987, the summer he did his leaving certificate, only to make the crossing to rugby in time for that famous visit of New Zealand when he was 19. He bought new boots ahead of that occasion and out on the field, with the All-Blacks getting ready to do the Haka, he was still trying to snap in the fancy new plug-studs which were the feature.

"I was nervous enough to begin with and then George Hook was glowering above me, shouting and saying, 'biggest game of your effin' life, Elwood and you can't even get your boots right,' he smiles now. Sitting in shorts and a sweatshirt in a hotel conservatory overlooking Galway bay, the reminiscences come fast and easy, although for most of his sporting life, Elwood shied away from talking about himself.

BUT IT IS not every week a man retires. "The referee was trying to calm me down, but he wasn't going to be able to let me play unless I got them fixed in properly. He was a lovely fella - from Wales - and I kept meeting him years afterwards at Celtic League games and we have this running joke where he checks my boots."

That grounding he received in Galway, the faith shown in him at such a young age gave him the confidence to move to Lansdowne in Dublin with a view to forcing his way on to the Irish team. In retrospect, that ambition seems incredibly presumptuous because it wasn't as if he was being courted by the IRFU.

"They probably thought, cheeky pup, up from the country, who the hell does he think he is? And I suppose the idea of a young guy from Galway filling the role of the likes of Mike Gibson and Ollie Campbell was a bit mad, but I was neither intimidated nor arrogant. I just wanted a crack. And Lansdowne was great. Gus Ahern was there and Noel Mannion and it was a country-ish club anyhow. My second season there, we were just on fire and the Irish team wasn't going well, they had lost 12 Tests on the spin and it was a case of being in the right place at the right time for me."

Elwood's 1993 debut was as spectacular as if was madcap. It arrived through a phone call, a gruff voice commanding him to be at the Berkeley Court on Wednesday morning. That Saturday in Cardiff, he kicked the lights out and Nicky Popplewell fell to his knees in floods of tears as Ireland won at last. Two weeks later, he played a consummate kicking game as the hapless Paddies beat England in the shock of the season. Authoritative and calm and gifted with the boot, Elwood was the sensation of Ireland's season and was being spoken of as a candidate for that summer's Lions tour.

"We all went on the lash in Kitty O'Shea's on the Sunday and then on Monday morning I headed off to Hong Kong. A single fortnight, two caps, two wins and offto the Far East. I was 23 and was waiting for someone to pinch me. It was madness. I didn't really have time to take any of it in."

Elwood's prodigious kicking feats were the toast of Irish rugby circles that year. But by the time he missed a dead simple penalty to win the return game against Wales a year later, he had already been cast as a defensive, kicking number 10 and was sometimes compared unfavourably with the more adventurous style of Paul Burke and later David Humphreys. Passing was never the flair aspect of his game. When he was a teenager, a damaged vertebra in his back led to the prognosis that his rugby days were over.

"Dr Gonzaga, a big, flamboyant man with a cigar up in Galway hospital. Told me to stop. He is dead now, God rest him. I just nodded. But ever since then, whenever I get a thump, my left arm tingles. It can feel a bit woozy. I have lived with it all through my career. Not making excuses about my passing or anything. But maybe it did make me more inclined to kick."

Although he was outhalf for the famous déjà vu win in Twickenham, when Ireland rocked the establishment courtesy of Simon Geoghegan's electric try, Elwood was on the verge of entering a tug-of-war scenario with Paul Burke for a claim on the number 10 jersey. He was in and then he was out.

"People put you in boxes. I knew I hadn't the quickest hands in the world, but I wasn't as typecast as was made out either. The argument for Burkey was that he was full of running, but lighter and maybe not as good defensively. I knew the time was going to come where the kicks wouldn't fall plus people were going to scrutinise me that bit more and sooner or later, I was going to have a shocker. I had a run of about 12 Tests and then I got the heave-ho.

"I would be lying if I said some of the stuff said and written in the newspapers didn't hurt. But Paul and myself always got on fine. We didn't pick the team. Burkey has always sussed me out after games, even over in Harlequins last year."

Of the 35 caps Elwood won, just two were as a substitute. He was a victim of the merry-go-round of ill-fated Irish managers that featured in the turbulent years of the middle to late 1990s. With Murray Kidd came silence. Brian Ashton revived his career and he remembers the English maverick as a marvellous experiment that just went wrong. Ashton's training sessions were a revelation, but maybe the coach was frustrated at the standard of the Irish team's fundamental ball skills. His departure was sudden and marked by a mutual, recriminatory silence.

"Was Ashton badly treated?" Elwood grimaces. "I don't know. Who was badly treated by whom? He signed a five-year deal for big money and then walked away and got settled for what, six figures? Who was badly treated there? Brian was frustrated beyond belief and he just didn't want to be there. He walked away."

Then came the Warren Gatland reign, a man he first met at that fated All-Blacks visit to Galway, a man who took him back to New Zealand to work on his game and who coached him in Connacht. Elwood was around for the 1999 World Cup, watching in horror from the bench on the dismal night in Lens when Ireland crashed out against Argentina.

"I picked up 22 stitches playing against Romania after I clattered into Johnny Bell so I had one of those turban affairs on my head," he recalls.

His last day in an Irish shirt was also as a replacement, on the bench in Twickenham when the white shirts were in a mood for wreckage, piling 50 points on Ireland. "It was one of those days when 30 green shirts on the field wouldn't have made a difference. I was cowering on the bench, to be honest. Nobody would have been that keen to go play."

On such random notes do international careers end. A fortnight later, Ronan O'Gara announced himself against Scotland and back west, Elwood knew it was full-time. "I just thought, that's it then. Do I apply for my two ex-international courtesy tickets now or will they arrive in the post?"

IN A WAY, though, the last five years of his rugby life have been the richest as he maintained a rich form for Connacht and has been immovable from the number 10 position, flourishing under his old scrumhalf and ex-Ireland buddy Michael Bradley. He declined at least one lucrative offer to play a season or two in France, believing that Connacht were paying him his worth and not wanting to disrupt his family. In the autumn of his rugby life, he has become the talisman for Connacht rugby and joined in the march to IRFU headquarters to protest against the infamous plan to effectively abandon the province from the national charter.

He leans forward in the seat and the husky voice becomes most animated when he talks about the future of Connacht, an issue that remains the grumbling volcano of Irish rugby. "I am very passionate about this. About being a Galway and a Connacht man. What I achieved in those days, getting to play outhalf for Ireland, yeah, I am proud of it. I stood for Ireland for the national anthem. All that talk about the four proud provinces and they want to get rid of one? This is a small island and they are trying to end the hopes of school children where I am from of one day playing for Ireland.

"Where will kids down here play rugby if Connacht goes? We have 20 schools playing senior cup now. Are they to go to Limerick? Every year we get this thrown in our face. The Connacht team is the show house and we do have to be more pro-active, yeah. But look, our player of the year is James Downey. He came down here because he couldn't get a look in at Leinster.

"I believe we are losing players because they are overloading the other three provinces. Aren't you better off playing against the guys that are holding you back rather than being stuck in the reserves?

"The threat to Connacht rugby is always there. You hear talk now that they will let it go under after the next world cup. We would be naive to think the danger has passed. The day we think that is the day we will be in trouble."

It seems a matter of predestination that Elwood will one day lead Connacht through such future fights for survival. Bradley is tipped for great things and stalwarts like Bernard Jackman are moving east, leaving this present dynamic on the verge of dissolution.

Today's semi-final against Sale represents a last stand, the most daring of all Connacht dreams. The province's eternal number 10 claims that he will treat it as just another game. After 17 years, he wants no fanfare. The Sportsground crowd will probably regard matters differently.

Eric Elwood has graced the windblown patch of ground beside the cemetery for so long that is hard to believe that time is closing in on his last game. They will come from far and wide to say goodbye.

"Listen, I won't be going too far," he promises. And that was the magical thing for Galway about Eric Elwood. He made it the whole way without ever leaving at all.