Keith Dugganhears from the Munster and Ireland hooker about combining fierce ambition with sense of place
It was in the afterglow of the autumn victory over Australia that Jerry Flannery felt the cold shiver of bad luck and a premonition of the uncertainty that comes with being an elite rugby player. At first it was just a vague, dull pain when he was putting on his jacket for dinner and he hardly gave it a second thought.
Ireland had, after all, just pulverised the Australian pack, bossing those famous gold and green shirts in a match that would prove the beginning of an emotional and highly successful farewell tour of Lansdowne Road. That game was like another ode to Flannery's emergence from the fringes of the Munster squad to the front line of the national team, where he instantly gained a reputation as one of the most dynamic and exuberant front-row forwards in the Six Nations.
Life was sweet and he was happy. But that shoulder twinge, it was bothersome. On holidays in the sunshine a few weeks later, he ran the beaches and lifted weights with no repercussions. But on his first day back at Munster training camp, doing bench presses, he knew he was in trouble.
"On holidays, I wasn't going around hitting anything," he laughed. "It was just after a training session back at home and when I was lifting a set of weights, I felt the shoulder make a clunking sound," he says, shaking his head and jerking his left shoulder forward to convey the strangeness of that sensation.
It was just after lunchtime on an unseasonably beautiful January day in Dalkey and Flannery appeared, as promised, in the conference room of the Killiney Castle, where the Irish team will be sequestered for most of the next two months. Although the management have favoured Ulster's Rory Best for the opening match, against Wales, Eddie O'Sullivan acknowledged the choice for hooker was the tightest of calls. And there is a general sense Flannery, an athletic, busy wrecking ball of a number two, will again recapture the spellbinding form of last year.
He was sanguine about not making the first XV for the visit to Cardiff. Those lean years of being reserve hooker with Munster taught him the discipline of accepting all selection decisions as simply out of his control. He learned the habits of hard work and patience, of waiting.
And for the last five months, he was thrust back into place, reliant on his self-belief and his work ethic, back at the beginning.
"Before I knew it, I was facing four weeks in a sling," he says. "It all happened very fast. The day I knew something was wrong, I thought I had imagined it so I went to lift the weights again and . . . that clunk. It was like nothing I had experienced before. It was totally alien to me.
"And things happened quickly after that. They got me scanned and then sent me to James Caldwell in Blackrock, who is the best in the business. The choice was either a long rest to see if the thing would knit properly or a full reconstruction. And that second option was the medical advice, given that it was a long season and I still, hopefully, have a good part of my career to play out."
But given Flannery's fortunes, he knew better than most the precariousness of being out of the mind's eye. It was, after all, an injury to Frankie Sheahan, the established Ireland hooker, that had given Flannery his opportunity to shine. It was circumstance that enabled him to showcase his big-match aptitude. That it came down to chance - to bad luck on Sheahan - is a frightening truth and one Flannery won't forget.
"Yeah, I wouldn't say my path was steady. It wasn't as if I said to myself, 'right, I'll spend four years on the bench here'. It was difficult to get the break. And for me, yeah, it was Frankie Sheahan getting injured. If Frankie hadn't been injured, I might have come in here and there and done well for 20 minutes.
"But it's hard for a coach to say, 'well, I'm gonna take this international out and give this other guy a run'. It is simply a tough situation and it is nobody's fault. So you wait, you bust your ass in training and stay intense and you look for that chance.
"But the quality in Munster is so high. You see guys like Eoin Reddan at Wasps and Stephen Keogh and Trevor Hogan in Leinster playing smashing rugby, then you realise the depth of the squad in Munster."
So all through August and September, he went through rehabilitation knowing once the season started he would be losing game time and the chance to continue impressing, to hammer home the momentum, and he knew it was going to be lonely.
"It's not nice but you have to cop on to it. I thought it would be worse. You miss out on the crack and that feeling of being part of the squad. But I was killing myself Monday to Friday and then just eating and sleeping at the weekend. See, I virtually had a one-on-one coach so I worked on speed and power with Tom Comyns and Kirsty Peacock was there full time for physiotherapy.
"And then finally James Caldwell give me the all-clear to hit bags and then we progressed from bags to ups and downs and finally it was "full metal jacket", with players just running full belt and me hitting them as hard as I can. So I did everything I could do and if the shoulder was going to go, it was going to go."
And then his face screws into the mischievous grin as he peers out from beyond the tumbling blond locks. Flannery's journey to the pinnacle of Irish rugby has been defined by his absolute commitment and work ethic. When he reviews his adolescent years, he gives the impression of a boy prepared to wing it in every aspect of life except rugby. He was still in school when he had a chin-up bar fitted in his bedroom, providing the comical image of the young St Munchin's man performing fanatical late-night feats of endurance, like Robert De Niro's Max Cady in Cape Fear.
Contrary to legend, he did not actually ram his Leaving Certificate in St Munchin's so he could come back for another tilt at the Munster Senior Cup after Ard Scoil beat them. It wasn't that he explicitly ditched academia but more, as he quaintly observed, that he didn't "go balls out at it" and was quite happy to repeat even though his points total was quite respectable.
In fact, he actually performed better in his first Leaving Certificate, rugby having consumed his every waking thought the subsequent year, and it was his initial results that secured him a place in UCC.
"I was fierce lucky," he grins. "The points dropped for me."
In UCC, he read English, Architecture, Sociology, Geography and Rugby.
"The place was brilliant. But I was all over the place with my study. Came out thinking I had aced every exam. Ended up repeating everything that summer while at the Munster under-20 camp. But I eventually knuckled down and got through. You know when you are at that stage when you don't really know what you want to do?"
Except, of course, that he did. Rugby was his ambition and even though he played at being the college slacker for a few years, he was secretly a workaholic. At Connacht, the intensity of his fitness sessions set a standard. When he joined Munster, he continued to push himself to extremes. But apart from the rare Celtic League excursion, he found himself on the best seat in the house. And he began to question himself.
"When you originally get that chance to be professional, it is an unbelievable feeling. It was hugely personal for me as well, growing up in Limerick and my father (Ger) so involved. I was keen to stick around and get my break. But the question enters your mind: how long? And it does test your patience. I would be lying if I said that calling it quits . . . hadn't crossed my mind.
"Ultimately, you want to play. My fear was that I would look back on having played professional rugby for a living but with no games to look back on. And I feared that I wasn't being honest with myself. So with Munster, you had to have that dogged mentality. You have to accept that it is hard to get in there. And when you do, that you better take the chance."
It helped that he was no overnight sensation. In his first full international, he threw his first lineout ball to Marco Bortolomi of Italy and failed to find anyone with his second. But that didn't faze him. He was a fresh face on the Six Nations scene and drew plenty of rave notices for his fearless, dynamic play and the "flaxen mane".
At 27, he has learned to look beyond the obsession with rugby and wistfully talks of going back to college at some point. He ruefully concedes one of his chief hobbies is film, making goofball documentaries and "Blizzard of Odd kind of stuff".
But for the next three months he will settle for life in front of the camera. Flannery would laugh at the suggestion he is a "star", but since his breakthrough he has attracted a loyal following. That was why in the teeming mist that hung over Thomond Park a fortnight ago, his emergence on the touchline drew raucous cheers. If the Munster are the people's team, Flannery is the ultimate local hero, the publican's son with the most humble and easygoing of dispositions allied to a fierce competitive pride and self-belief.
The Thomond record was on the line and Leicester, the opposition, were obdurate. And Flannery's return, with over 25 minutes left, was designed to bust the game open.
"I was mad for action coming in," he grimaces. "And I got my hands on the ball a few times but I don't know . . . they almost Munstered us. Maybe we panicked. It's a game I would love to revisit. But you can't . . . it's water under the bridge now. And it wasn't because we lost in Thomond that galled me. You cannot depend on the ground, special as it is. The crowd can make all the noise they want and if the team doesn't do it on the field, it makes no difference."
Last Saturday, he turned out for Shannon in the AIL in a late attempt to squeeze in extra minutes and keep in Eddie O'Sullivan's thoughts. When he was a youngster, the Shannon shirt had a powerful allure and he valued the chance to again wear the colours.
"The great thing was, when I came into the dressingroom, nobody was snotty. You know, I felt kind of bad showing up like that but the boys made me feel incredibly at home. Like Seán Cronin, the hooker, was rested. And TJ Hickey got his first start of the season, another cracking player, and I felt a bit bad coming in for him at half-time. But they were straight-up sound about it. And I'm still very proud to play with Shannon. I love that club."
Flannery's unique journey means he can move easily between those grassroots Saturday afternoons of Irish club rugby and tomorrow's grand, operatic occasion in Cardiff. And though Jerry Flannery is back on the bench, nobody expects him to be sitting there for very long.
