INTERVIEW WITH DR LIAM HENNESSY:Dr Liam Hennessy recently retired with, typically, the minimum of fuss. He gives GERRY THORNLEYa rare insight into his golden years with Ireland

TEN YEARS. It went like that. A golden 10 years for Irish rugby; Leagues, Heineken Cup and Crowns galore, and a Slam. Irish rugby has never had it so good, and the frontline players have never been so well looked after – akin to thoroughbreds.

When it comes to analysing some of the key men behind the extraordinary transformation after the grim 1990s, the appointment of Dr Liam Hennessy in January 2000 as the IRFU’s director of fitness was uppermost amongst them.

He recently retired with, typically, the minimum of fuss. No fanfare please, it’s not the good Doctor’s way, but he agreed to this interview in his picturesque home on the lake in Killaloe. Always a charmingly polite and interesting man, he generously rustles up breakfast and is quickly into his stride chatting about new developments in his area of expertise. That he had to resign was, sadly, forced upon him.

“Well, I’ve no choice really, having been diagnosed with cancer. It’s inoperable and then the treatment schedule that’s ahead. I’m now on the journey of a two-year programme, hopefully, that will lead to it being well managed. As I said to you, after the first bout of radiotherapy I couldn’t walk to the gate and while I had meetings here and all that during it, I just hadn’t the energy.”

He will stay involved with Pádraig Harrington from his home office but for now it’s time to take care of himself while pausing for reflection. Prior to being appointed by the IRFU 10 years ago he had effectively been the first in his field to become involved in rugby with Bective Rangers and with Stephen Aboud at the IRFU Academy in the mid-90s, working with the likes of Jeremy Davidson, Denis Hickie, Brian O’Driscoll and Peter Stringer, and then with Leinster in the mid to late 90s.

They’d test the Academy boys at various camps and then give them kit bags of “vipers”, wobble boards and the like to improve their balance, mobility, acceleration and speed. He also recounts an amusing story while working part-time with Leinster circa 1997. In between appointments at the Blackrock Clinic, he engineered a two-hour window to attend a Leinster training session at the Wesley back pitch in Donnybrook.

In the distance he can see the then Leinster kitman, Paddy “Rala” O’Reilly (now with Ireland). “He’s got a big white sheet and he’s doing that with the sheet (motions a man waving and extending a sheet out in front of him with two arms) and I was saying ‘Ah Jaysus he’s not doing his laundry out there is he?’”

Meanwhile, Victor Costello has parked his car, and walked across the pitch. He pulls up a chair and pours himself some cornflakes. Rala’s sheet is a tablecloth for the players to have their breakfast before training. He had a little chat with Rala.

“There was never a table cloth laid out after that right, or Victor never got served breakfast on the sideline ever again,” he says with a rueful smile.

When he first started full-time with the IRFU he recalls they had a staff of five and a half, the half being Mark McManus in Cork who was part-time, along with Fergal O’Callaghan in Limerick, Jason Cowman in Leinster, Johnny Glynn in Connacht and Mike Bull in Ulster. The latter two have moved on, but O’Callaghan and Cowman remain. Now they have 21, also taking in the provincial academies.

“Also remember we went from a cabin in St Andrew’s with Mike Ruddock to the shed in Old Belvo, you know that dreadful shed, as the weight training was a string (sic) facility. You could only have one at a time in the container in St Andrew’s so I’d be there in my role with Leinster putting the Irish guys and the Leinster guys through one after another and then I brought Dave Fagan on board. I mean it wasn’t Spartan, it was Stone Age!”

While there was “a reasonable facility” in Ravenhill, Connacht and Munster had to use local gyms. The season was only developing a full-time professional structure, and players were mixing club games on mudbaths while also playing in the Six Nations, while the concept of game management wasn’t even notional.

“One player who is still currently playing in England was playing 96 games in two seasons. That was his load at that stage. Jeremy Staunton; a terrific lad, a terrific, terrific guy. But that was typical back then. The accumulation of games meant by the end of a phase they were worse off in condition than they would have been starting off. In other words there was no positive development, it was only going backwards.”

He attributes the change round to the IRFU in first bringing home the English-based players and also changing their own amateur mindsets from their own playing days. He mentions Tommy Kiernan, Syd Millar, Noel Murphy and union presidents such as Eddie Coleman, Roy Loughead and Bill Lavery.

While facilities in Ireland generally wouldn’t be cutting edge, they are now functional and well-equipped. “Whatever is needed is there and the people that we have, the fitness staff that I can only speak for who I reckon are the best in the business.”

Hennessy had been based in Germany and England, and had gone to the USA to see their Olympic training centres, as well as the famed Australian Institute for Sport. “So a crucial part of it was education.” Around 2000 or 2001, the then Irish team manager Donal Lenihan asked Hennessy how long it would take for the conditioning of Irish players to catch up with the Southern Hemisphere big three and was aghast when the good doctor estimated six to eight years.

“Remember, when our guys were going out playing even though they were the same chronological age as the others, somebody who might be 26 back then but had eight years of programmed conditioning training behind them. Then you had our guys who had only zero one. Who was going to win in terms of physical stakes? That’s like sending your four-year-old against an eight-year-old. The eight-year-old is always going to bowl him over. So that’s where we were.”

To speed this process up, they hired Philip Morrow, Aidan O’Connell and Kevin Craddock, three full-time Academy fitness coaches, to target schools and regions. Many of the players under their domain are still playing Test rugby in their 30s now. But they also had to work from the top down. Cue Spala, Poland.

“Because it was an Olympic training centre for a cross section of athletes including weight lifters, athletes, soccer players, and they were the core athletes that were in Spala. What we needed was to see how others did it and to live in that environment and not alone that but to tidy up how you eat, how you sleep, the regiment of real training. So we took the initiative long before the cryotherapy came on board. Cryotherapy we were told was going to be added in when we had already booked the facility.”

Aside from speeding up recovery, Hennessy maintains they saw the body shapes as well as the fitness levels of Irish players change. Pre-season visits to Poland were gradually scaled down and haven’t been used since ’07, not least because Irish rugby now has its own high performance units, right down to academy level.

By the World Cup of 2007, Irish rugby players should have virtually caught up. There had been a detailed four-year programme in place, from extended pre-seasons to game management, yet they rarely looked so horribly drained, physically and mentally, in a sequence of generally below-par performances.

Part of the reason the hangover lingered for so long was the truth was never properly addressed. The oft-cited reason of insufficient preparation games never stacked up, simply because the likes of France, England and Argentina (three of the four semi-finalists) were no better off. So what went wrong Liam?

“I think simply the Genesis report states the boys couldn’t have been in better shape. That’s not me saying it. That’s an independent body saying it. They did their homework to find that out. We had a 52-week countdown plan where all the guys, all our guys, were involved in making sure the guys were in the best possible shape. There was great harmony in how it worked. Then Eddie (O’Sullivan) who is in my book an outstanding coach, Eddie did put his hands up and by his own admission said he got it wrong on that front.”

By this Hennessy means in terms of match preparation and actual pitch work. “I suppose there was a panic . . . here were a couple of moments I would imagine of realisation that ‘Oh we ain’t ready, rugby wise, for the game’. We’ve gone through it ad nauseam, and it was a huge stressful time for everybody. I know the guys in terms of strength, power, speed, everything they were way up there,” he says, pointing his hand above his head and suggesting their physical endurance for the rest of that season and since underlines the point.

So they were over-trained, or in Hennessy’s terminology, over-practised.

“I mean, look, it’s a lesson for everybody. You can’t fatten the pig before the fair. You can’t cram in all those hours of extra work on the pitch technically. You can’t keep doing that through the tournament. That only goes one way, down in terms of performance. So that over-concentration on ‘let’s get this right’, ‘let’s do more on the pitch to make up for what’s not being done and to make up for the lack of performances’. So that’s what I mean by mistakes being made and lessons learned.”

Hennessy had always planned to visit Bordeaux in the early stages of the World Cup for his now infamous set-to with O’Sullivan. Alarmed by the stories filtering home of the players being “over-practised”, Hennessy approached the Irish coach.

“I had a couple of suggestions for Eddie which were relating to reducing workload dramatically which was crucial and also a couple of other novel ideas. We’d organised Pádraig Harrington to come down and give the boys a surprise talk, to distract them from the daily rigours, which was a good idea to be suggested to Eddie, but it never got on to the table.”

Was the work load reduced? “No.”

Moving on to 2011, he suggests the major lesson to be learned is how much can go wrong in the “immediate pre-period” before a World Cup. Sports science continues to evolve rapidly and Hennessy is like a kid with a new toy when discussing how the players now train with a GPS (global positioning system), which measures every metre they move, the speed at which they move, the impact at which they hit the ground and the impact at which they collide.

That so many thirtysomethings are still as fit as in their peak and playing Test rugby is a source of evident pride to him. That said, he feels he would be trodding on other people’s feet if he were to speculate any further on how the core group of players, now almost four years older and in their 30s, should be managed up to 2011. “I’ll have been removed from it and that’s very important to say.”

Besides, fitness programmes have become increasingly individualised and he says they couldn’t be in better hands. He cites with satisfaction how fitness coaches from Arsenal and Manchester United have visited the IRFU to see how they run their ship, and how far behind they are.

“So it’s not alone other rugby countries that have looked in on our system to see how is this happening, it’s scientists and coaches from other sports who are looking in.”

And not alone has Irish rugby caught up at under-age levels with the likes of England and Wales, Hennessy feels that “we have certain competitive advantages and I’d like to think that one of them is the people we have are really, really tuned in and know what needs to be done”.

The good Doctor can walk away and reflect with pride on the job he did, even if it was far, far from a one-man show. “I look back and I just have great time for all the people that have been involved. We could have very strong arguments behind closed doors and you need to. During my tenure there were such great coaches, great fitness coaches and great administrators. I couldn’t have spent a better 10 years in sport.”

You sincerely hope the future is as bright for him as it is for Irish rugby.

“Well it’s a journey that I must respect and I must just get on with. And I will and I’ll enjoy it.”