He’s from O’Callaghans Mills in East Clare and is now the attack coach for Bordeaux Bègles. And it won’t be the first time for Noel McNamara to come up against his native Munster.
He’s been in this situation before with the Sharks when they visited Thomond Park in the Champions Cup, when they beat Munster 50-35 in the Round of 16 two seasons ago, before drawing another URC match back in Durban three weeks later.
“It’s a fantastic opportunity for us, it’s as simple as that, for UBB and the club,” he reasons.
“It’s something that we’ve worked very hard for. Last year we had a bitter disappointment in the quarter-final against Harlequins,” he adds regarding the latter’s 42-41 win in Bordeaux, “and we’re very, very eager to get back to this point to show that we’ve grown and developed and improved on where we were last year. That’s really it.”
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The 133-year-old Bouclier de Brennus for winning the French Championship will always be the most-cherished trophy for a Top 14 club and its supporters but, à la La Rochelle until three seasons ago, not having won a major trophy before, UBB crave either that or the Champions Cup trophy.
To that end, they finished the pool stages as top seeds, thereby ensuring home advantage potentially through to the final.
“It’s a very clear ambition for the players and the coaching staff,” says McNamara, noting that director of rugby Yannick Bru has won the Champions Cup as a player and assistant coach with Toulouse.
Many of the UBB players grew up admiring the colour and atmosphere which Munster brought to this tournament, and McNamara also notes that the core of this Munster team won the URC two seasons ago.
“This is a quality side, there’s absolutely no doubt about that. They’ve had some challenges with injuries and some turmoil as well with the change in the coach, but La Rochelle is not an easy place to go. I’ve been there twice with UBB and haven’t won on either occasion. It’s going to be a massive test for us.”
What’s perhaps more unusual than encountering Munster – and tells us much about McNamara’s journey to this point – is how many of the Munster team he has come across in a coaching career which has thus far been entirely outside his native province.
McNamara coached Tadhg Beirne when he captained Clongowes to the cup in 2010, Jeremy Loughman and Oli Jager (Ireland schools), Diarmuid Barron, Tom Ahern, John Hodnett, Jack Crowley and Calvin Nash (Irish Under-20s), Josh Wycherley and Craig Casey (both schools and 20s), Tom Farrell (Leinster Under-19s), Sean O’Brien (Leinster and Irish Under-20s) and most recently Thaakir Abrahams at the Sharks.
“There’s a lot of familiarity and that’s special as well. Hopefully I’ll catch up with them after the game but before that, the serious business,” he says.
A self-proclaimed farming enthusiast from Co Clare, McNamara is the third-youngest and only boy in a family of four who grew up on a small farm. His dad, Denis, is 81 and still farms, and on Wednesday evening helped bring a new calf into the world.
McNamara’s mum, Mary, was a midwife in the Limerick Regional Hospital and his three sisters also followed a medical path. Róisín is a paediatrician in Temple Street children’s hospital in Dublin, while Joanne and Edel are nurses.
“In South Africa there is a saying in Zulu which translates as: ‘You must walk on the land your ancestors walked on at least once every six months.’ And I try to get home at least once every few months.”
He played every sport – bar rugby – be it Gaelic football, hurling, football, tennis, badminton.
“Rugby wasn’t really a feature in rural Clare at the time,” he explains. An attempt was made to start up an under-13 rugby team in his hometown, involving trial matches with a Gaelic ball, but only McNamara and Bryan Donnellan, a future League of Ireland footballer and the older brother of All-Ireland-winning captain Patrick, declared an interest.
It was while studying PE in the University of Limerick that McNamara did his final-year project with PJ Smith, a psychology and skill-acquisition lecturer.
“I did variable practice as my thesis on the penalty kick in soccer and PJ was the supervisor.”
Also in that year, Glenstal Abbey rang Smith looking for a temporary geography teacher/rugby coach/PE teacher. Smith recommended McNamara, who began coaching a Glenstal under-14 team featuring Duncan Casey, a future Munster hooker. Whereupon Clongowes Wood College contacted UL looking for a PE teacher/rugby coach.
McNamara was unsure, but Smith insisted: “You are going to be a coach.”
That was 2005 and his sliding doors moment. McNamara coached the Clongowes Under-13s for two seasons, with players such as Conor Gilsenan, Jordan Coughlan, Ed Byrne, Brian Byrne and Peadar Timmins.
“Coaching was an addiction as much as anything else. In another lifetime maybe I could have stayed in Glenstal or PJ Smith recommended somebody else and I could be coaching basketball now. Who knows? PJ had a huge impact on my career. An amazing man.”
For eight years he coached the Clongowes senior team, culminating in an exceptional side including Will Connors and Rowan Osborne losing to Belvedere in the semis. He’d also coached the Irish schools, Leinster Under-18s and Under-19s sides, before McNamara took up an offer from Bobby Byrne to coach UCD in the AIL, all with his eyes on coaching the Ireland Under-20s.
The latter came to pass in 2017-18, which was a challenging season and ended with an IRFU-instigated stint as defence coach at North Harbour, also challenging but “a brilliant experience” analysing opposition attacks.
Ireland won an Under-20 grand slam in 2019 and were set to repeat the feat after retaining the Triple Crown with a stunning 39-21 win over England in Franklin’s Gardens when the pandemic hit.
McNamara returned to Leinster as the academy manager but he missed coaching and seeing players develop and teams becoming more than the sum of their parts.
David Nucifora set up an opportunity to coach with the Sharks in 2021 – a big ask of his wife Sinead and their three young daughters, Iseult, Aarya and Portia, now 11, nine and five. But Nucifora knew McNamara had the coaching bug and didn’t want him to have any regrets.
“A lot of coaching is about timing,” says McNamara, and the two years as attack coach at the Sharks were enjoyable despite the disappointment of two URC quarter-final exits to the Bulls and Leinster.
In 2022, Bru took a sabbatical after four years with Bayonne culminated in them winning promotion to the Top 14. Bru worked as a contact coach with the Sharks, only going to home games, and recharged his batteries.
“He’d seen my approach, our ideas on the game were very similar, and he said: ‘I’d like you to coach the attack in Bordeaux.’ As my wife will tell you, I sometimes underestimate challenges and I didn’t really think too much about the language. With hindsight, that was probably slightly foolish.”
Still, with Damian Penaud also arriving, UBB upped their tally of 63 tries in the previous season (2022-23), to 124 last year and have 110 thus far in the current campaign. Sinead and the girls are happy, and he’s signed a new deal until 2027.
So, what’s it like coaching Louis Bielle-Biarrey, Penaud, Matthieu Jalibert, Yoram Moefana, Joey Carbery (whom McNamara believes had his best game for UBB last week against Ulster) et al?
“It’s obviously a privilege to coach such talented players who work hard and want to get better. For me, it’s about coaching them to play together. It’s not telling Damian Penaud how to pass the ball. It’s about trying to bring a collective understanding and an ability to read and play off each other.
“Attack is not just the backline, it’s all 15, so we do our units largely on that and it is around skills, games and improve our ability to play as a collective.”
The counter-attacking tries against Ulster last week were examples of exceptional individuals working cohesively.
[ Bordeaux Bègles set up Munster quarter-final after comfortable win over UlsterOpens in new window ]
“There are different ways of playing the game and that’s not to say one is better than the other. Some teams will have 200 rucks in a game, some will have 50, and there’s no guarantee that the team with 50 rucks is going to score more than the team with 200, and that’s the beauty of the game.”
In a segue, McNamara cites a statistic from Leinster’s 62-0 win over Harlequins, namely that the latter had a better tackle completion, and adds: “For Munster it’s about putting maximum pressure on the ruck, for us, obviously it’s the ability to keep the ball alive and beat your man so we’ll try, if at all possible, not to have a ruck.”
All things considered, the man from East Clare has taken a road less travelled but has landed on his feet. Does he ever stop and think of this?
“No, I tend not to look back,” he says, chuckling. “Peter Smyth was my boss twice in Leinster, first as academy manager and then he moved up. He used to always say: ‘Don’t worry about this job or that job or the other job, because you won’t make that decision. Somebody else will make that decision.’
“The only thing you can focus on is doing the best possible job you can do in the one you’re in right now. I think it’s brilliant advice.”
Ends.
