Michael Murphy’s humbling lessons from Clermont Auvergne

Everyone has their own misconceptions about professional sport, and for Michael Murphy, almost everything he thought would be different about playing rugby at Clermont Auvergne was proved wrong.

Any preciousness was lost in their graciousness. Even as the amateur, he felt humbled by their attitude. And yes sometimes less truly is more.

There is always the inference Clermont were simply playing the kind host, as Murphy was introduced as the latest guinea pig for the AIB-backed The Toughest Trade. None of the Clermont players had even heard of the Donegal football captain, and might well have assumed his celebratory status here was based on something other than his sporting prowess.

In that sense they too would be proved wrong.

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“I think my biggest misconception was the whole concept of what I thought a professional environment would be,” says Murphy, speaking ahead of the latest episode where he spends a week training with the Top 14 side in France, while former Wales winger Shane Williams tries his hand at Gaelic football with Murphy’s club Glenswilly.

“I thought it would be quite ‘false’, for want of a better word, that players might be very well looked after, take things for granted. But I was fairly humbled coming away from it, how welcoming they were, and I genuinely felt that from them.

“And culturally, the whole set-up, and I don’t know whether it was something Clermont themselves are trying to push, but they really do treat each other extremely well, are very courteous to each other. I would have thought it wouldn’t have been as ‘real’, if you know what I mean. So to meet them and see they are every bit as humble and every bit as grateful for the opportunity they have, was a huge thing, I thought.”

New experience

This wasn't Clermont's off-season either. Murphy spent the week in January as Joe Schmidt's former club prepared to travel to Ian Madigan's Bordeaux-Bégles, so this was the real deal. The main theme of The Toughest Trade is also to discover how amateur players can adopt to a professional sport largely different to their own, and vice versa. While Murphy admits he's always been a fan of rugby and once threw a few passes while studying at DCU, it was largely a new experience for the 27-year-old.

So – and spoiler alert aside – does Murphy think he could have made it as a professional rugby player?

“Ah nah, I doubt it. You would have loved to have tried it at a young age, to see what you’d come up with. But definitely the physicality and the technical side of things, I was really gazumped by how technical the tackle is. I just assumed it was just chucking yourself at someone.

“So from 15 or 16 you’d need to be getting into a niche fairly quickly, unlike Gaelic football the way it is at the moment. You have players trying to broaden their horizons and become a little bit less specific. In rugby you need to become fairly specific fairly quickly, to realise what position you are going to be playing in.

“And Clermont is an unbelievable set-up, and training alongside the likes of Aurélien Rougerie and [Morgan] Parra and the likes of these boys was just unbelievable. I suppose I got on decent at it, and kicking was one of the skills I suppose I was able to do a little bit more fluently than some of the rest. Physically, I’d be a wee bit behind, and the level that some of them are at, there’s not a hope I would.

“Obviously players are segregated, into backs and forwards, and I scrambled straight for the back. But I also came away thinking we’re not too dissimilar in what we are doing, in Gaelic. Now maybe that’s not the right way to do things, but rightly or wrongly, there was some crossover.”

Rest periods

The professional components, however, stood apart, beginning with the designated rest periods every day: “The one glaring thing missing for a GAA player the opportunity to rest. I know it’s a cliché, and I thought about it myself before I went out, how much rest do we actually need to try and perform?

“But it was really highlighted out there, the emphasis they place on it. And how they actually carry it out, it’s like an act. They come in, do their training, are then able to sleep for an hour and a half during the day. Whereas I was up, was buzzing, and looking around at myself, high as a kite going into next training session. They are able to do that, and a result, their improvements and the advancements they get from their training are greatly enhanced.”

Every training session, he noticed, had the ball in hand, and for all their professional obligations, they also knew when to back off: “There is probably a culture in Gaelic, within players, to squeeze as much into the training as we can. The whole buzz now is recovery, but I still feel we want to do more, want to squeeze as much into our days as we can.”

Which must be one of the great misconceptions about amateur sport.

‘The Toughest Trade’ with Michael Murphy and Shane Williams airs Wednesday at 9.30pm on RTÉ2.