Back home to make more of the 'hard yards'

2011 RUGBY WORLD CUP:FROM THE spectacular, landlocked basin of Queenstown, Ireland moved on to the coastal town of New Plymouth yesterday. The women's World Pro-Am championships have been held here and even the highway has been renamed Surf Highway.

For Ireland’s scrum coach, Greg Feek, it was a fairly surreal day. New Plymouth is where Feek was born, reared and where he did his “hard yards”.

The Ireland squad were scheduled to train in his old school grounds, New Plymouth Boys’ School, today. “That will be special, and will bring back memories of playing for the first XV. The ground is in the gully and the school does a haka during the game – 900 kids doing the haka is pretty special.”

On his first day “home” in a year, Feek admits he didn’t have the balance for surfing, which meant that fishing was his alternative to rugby.

“If the fish are running you’ll see hordes of boats – it’s like a supermarket out there. You can pretty much catch anything,” he said, and last night he was looking forward to his father Murray laying on a seafood feast for his homecoming.

Rugby was in the gene pool and in the air, witness when Feek’s son Oscar went to kindergarten before they moved to Ireland a year ago.

“They were all lining up for the national anthem, these three-and-a-half to four-year-olds, then they’d do the haka – they didn’t know what they were doing, they just slapped their legs – and then they played rugby.”

“I said to the lady who taught me as well and she said: ‘Yep, you guys did that as well’. It’s ingrained early, and for my dad rugby was everything. I was a big kid growing up, so there it was. You just fall into it and go with it.”

Feek himself started playing at five years of age with a local club called Star, which is now called Spotswood United, though it was only after school that his career took off.

Having played for the New Zealand Colts and Taranaki, and just finished an apprenticeship, he went on to Canterbury at 22, where he played for most of his career.

He won 10 caps for the All Blacks between 1999 and 2001, his penultimate Test being a particularly memorable day in their 40-29 win over Ireland at Lansdowne Road. Feek, whose Maori heritage comes from his mother Huia, led the haka that day.

“Not only starting a Test in Dublin in Lansdowne Road, but having to lead the haka as well – the guys still give me shit about it.”

Feek gave his father some jerseys to mind when he moved to Dublin, “and he found an Irish jersey with number three on it which I must have swapped with John Hayes”.

He won his last cap in the ensuing game against Scotland but a combination of a neck injury and the emergence of other props brought an end to his Test career. For the last five or six years he’s been coaching, though a year ago he would never have envisaged being back here as the Ireland scrum coach.

The Irish scrum had a mixed August, but Feek was “pretty happy with the two hit-outs” against France, and amid all the different combinations used, especially in Bordeaux, he cited the difficulties in having two tall props, Tony Buckley and John Hayes, packing down either side of, say, Seán Cronin.

Paddy O’Brien recently intimated that referees will be encouraged to limit the number of reset scrums, but with the forecast suggesting a rainy, windy night at Stadium Taranaki, Feek is hopeful the referee will allow some leeway for resets.

Conditions should also make the scrums more significant, and judging on their Churchill Cup efforts, the Eagles appear to have problems in this area.

Even without Cian Healy, Ireland might reasonably hope to make their scrum a weapon on the night.

“I think at this level you need to treat a team as how they are or what you’ve seen, or you rely on your own standards and go out and do that.

“No matter what we will treat the USA with respect in all facets on the day, but we’ll be going into this game with our standards, so without trying to fuel the fire or anything like that, we definitely want to set some really high standards starting from now on in this World Cup.”