Finally, at the age of 27, it’s happening for Tommy O’Brien. He has become the kind of international winger he’s long looked capable of being and is now part of the Irish team.
Sitting at a table outside the High Performance Centre in The Campus on a slightly chilly, grey day in Quinta Do Lago, O’Brien is in rarefied air among the Irish squad at their pre-Six Nations training base.
There were times when even he doubted if this might happen, but having turned 27 last May as an uncapped player, next Thursday comes perhaps the biggest game of his career yet – a Six Nations debut against France in Paris.
It’s been quite the turnaround from what he has known in his pro career. Where previously he has been trying to break into the Leinster frontline team, or working his way back from injury, now he is an elite Leinster and Irish player.
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This has been a different season for him. For one thing, his game time is managed and this is the first time O’Brien has been named in a Six Nations squad.
Now that this is finally coming to pass, for all the injury woes, in another sense it seems like his destiny. For starters, he’s steeped in Blackrock College.
“Yeah, my dad [Michael] loved his time there and my uncle [Pauo] would have loved his time there. I guess I was indoctrinated as a kid. There’s funny videos of me as a four-year-old singing ‘Rock Boys Are We’, which probably should never see the light of day,” he admits.
“I never got a schools cup medal, so that’s the one thing my dad holds over me. I think I passed him in everything else.”
His dad is a GP who was part of the Blackrock team which won the Leinster Schools Cup in both 1986 and ’87, when he captained the side, but O’Brien was part of a very blue-blooded Rock team himself alongside Caelan Doris, Gavin Mullin and Conor Dean among others, which won the Junior Cup.
“In that team, I think our whole backline played either Irish schools or Irish under-18s or under-19s. We had Paddy Patterson, Liam Turner, myself, Gav Mullin, Stephen Kilgallan, Connor Dean and James McGowan was a great player as well.”
O’Brien missed the Senior Cup campaign in his final year due to a broken leg, when the side lost in the quarter-finals to a Belvedere College team which went on to lift the trophy.
But he couldn’t have had a better introduction to the game in his formative sporting years.
“It starts from such an early age. You’re told how they want to play. In the first year, Tony Smeeth is the coach and you’re not allowed to kick the ball, so you run everything, and skills are ingrained into you, which 100 per cent stands to you.
“You’ve also got role models to look up to. Garry [Ringrose] was three years ahead of me,” says O’Brien, who was an outside centre all through his school years.
He also cites Luke Fitzgerald and Andrew Conway as boyhood Blackrock heroes and role models. “It’s nice when you can see a path to follow.”
I think it was always a pipe dream
— Tommy O'Brien
From an early age O’Brien was also shown videos of another Blackrock College 13 scoring a certain hat-trick in Paris, and told why this was such a big deal. He was still an impressionable 10-year-old when watching Ronan O’Gara’s drop goal in Cardiff and Brian O’Driscoll captaining Ireland to the Grand Slam.
“I think it was always a pipe dream,” he says of his Irish international dreams, “but I never thought of it as a reality until leaving school and starting to go into the 20s system.”
“I wasn’t sure how that was going to work, how far I was going to get, and then I played that 2017 [under-20s] Six Nations. Off the back of that I got offered the Leinster academy contract and then I was like: ‘Okay, there’s a path here’. But obviously, it took a while.”
Indeed. O’Brien, Doris and Rónan Kelleher were among those who joined the Leinster academy in 2018. But in the intervening years O’Brien was often on the sidelines as contemporaries made huge strides.
“It’s tough seeing that. You’re delighted for the guys breaking through, but there’s obviously an element of jealousy, I guess, which I think is only natural. But thankfully, I bided my time and now here it is.”
There are others to whom he owes a debt, among them Noel McNamara. Despite O’Brien missing his final Leinster Schools Cup campaign with that broken leg, McNamara invited him into the Irish Schools/Under-18s team, when he played against an English side featuring Tom and Ben Curry and Ben Earl.
McNamara was also his Under-20s coach. “Great guy and a great coach.”
Crucially, he was also exposed to athletics and his mum Michelle was a 200m runner.
“I think they say a lot of your DNA comes from your mum’s side,” he jokes, adding that his younger sisters, Robyn and Emma, were both better sprinters than him. “They won All-Ireland underage medals. I was never fast enough to be a sprinter.”
O’Brien was more of a 110m hurdler, winning the Leinster Championships. Nor does he believe he was blessed with out-and-out pace.
“It was definitely something I worked on. My dad was mad into athletics. He was an Irish schools hurdler as well. The rugby season in Blackrock would always finish in March time and I would have done athletics from then all through the summer as a kid.”
Sarah Healy was a few years below him in the Blackrock Athletics Club and he also went to Dundrum South Dublin Athletics Club to have more training partners when in fifth year in school.
“It was really big for my development in gaining running mechanics and working on speed all over the summer. And then it was into Leinster Schools and rugby took over.”
It was in his Leinster Academy days that he moved from midfield to the wing.
“Harry and Ross Byrne were always telling me I needed to move out to the wing. Maybe they saw something there in me, or maybe they were having a dig at me for not speaking to them enough as a distributor at 12,” he says, laughing.
While in UCD, O’Brien studied an actuary financial degree, before opting for the financial route. He used his time off after suffering an ACL injury in training before Leinster’s Champions Cup semi-final in May 2022 to sit the first two levels of his CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) exams, with one remaining.
“Then that will be my bridge to when rugby ends because it was probably pretty uncertain for me over the last couple of years whether this was going to actually materialise. Now I’ll be able to push it out for another couple of years but it’s good to have a backup plan in place for sure.”
His countless setbacks would have broken the spirit of many, but having made his way back from that ACL injury, there was almost one too many.
Thursday night, opening the Six Nations, I think it’s the stuff of dreams
— Tommy O'Brien
“I guess I always had faith but last January, when I was supposed to play against La Rochelle, I had to pull out with a hamstring and I remember being told that it was going to be another six to eight weeks.
“I was a bit broken at that stage because I felt like I was on top of everything that I was being told to do and it just felt like my body was failing me. That was probably the biggest amount of doubt and I was thinking: ‘I don’t know if this is going to happen for me.’”
But with those defeatist thoughts though, came a liberation.
“When I got back from that I was thinking: ‘Listen, I have nothing to lose now. Everything from here is a bonus. I’m not going to play within myself. If this is it I’m not going to go out with any regrets.’
“It was probably pretty freeing every time I came on to the pitch for the rest of the season. ‘This is what you’ve done all the work for just enjoy it’ was the kind of thing I said to myself every time I was running out on to the pitch.”
James Lowe has also said that O’Brien has learned to pace himself over the week rather than doing everything at 100 per cent every day. O’Brien actually agrees.
“It probably comes with a bit of maturity and when you’ve got a bit of money in the bank with coaches, you realise you don’t need to be killing yourself in training. They know what you can do on the weekends.
“It’s a hard battle. When you’re young you want to be impressing at training. You’re desperate.”
Next Thursday he is set to pits his wits and his pace against Louis Bielle-Biarrey in the Stade de France. Some way to make one’s Six Nations debut.
“I’ve watched so many games when France are playing in the Stade de France. The French supporters are unbelievable. Seeing the atmosphere at some of those World Cup games in France was incredible so, Thursday night, opening the Six Nations, I think it’s the stuff of dreams.
“That’s what you play for and hopefully have some family and my fiancee [Zoe Connolly] to come over, fingers crossed, if I’m involved.
“That would be pretty special to play in front of 80,000 and having a few friendly faces in the crowd would be incredible.”
