Niggling injuries have plagued Jerry Flannery this season, but he is now ready to put them behind him and start boxing above his weight, writes Gerry Thornley

AT 31, IT comes as a surprise to think that Jerry Flannery only has 33 caps. A two-time Heineken Cup, Grand Slam-winning hooker, he seems to have given us more than that. There would have been more, but for injuries and one suspension, but this intensely driven man will ensure as much as humanly possible there’ll be plenty more yet. That’s his way.

A troublesome calf injury followed on from his summer misfortune, limiting him to just one competitive start for Munster coming into this international window. Yet his darts have been wonderful, and in the loose he has continued to look like a bunny on wheels powered by Duracel.

Ideally, he’d have liked another four or five games for Munster, but so be it. Mentally, he tells himself he’s 100 per cent or “a 100 per cent of what I have at the moment and you just go for it”. He togs out big, as Mick Galwey once said of him, and he has always punched above his weight. A case in point will be today, when Flannery, 1.80 m (5ft 11in) and 100 kg (15st 10lbs), comes up against John Smit, 1.86m (6ft 1¼in) and 125kg (19st 7lbs), for the first time.

“I played against Smit before, he was playing for Clermont. He’s done everything in the game, you know man. I’m very impressed with him. But I look forward to it and people want to talk their scrum up and everything else, that’s happy days for us.”

He wouldn’t normally over-analyse the opposition scrum, but was mightily impressed by the redesigned Australian frontrow. Flannery wouldn’t take much note of the Fijian game, but is hopeful the Ireland frontrow won’t be as rusty as it was two weeks ago.

“I think that the mentality towards scrummaging is changing at the top level because of foreign influences,” he says, citing Gert Smal. “I’m noticing it more and more that scrummaging is something that really takes experience. I mean, you gotta get d****ed a couple of times, and you pick up things and you go ‘ah this is how it happens’ and then you learn to do it to somebody else. The thing is to be a quick learner.”

He’s that too, and today comes another incline on the learning curve, a first ever meeting with the Springboks. “The more you play the top teams the more used you are to them and then hopefully come World Cup time you’re ready for these guys; you know what they’re about. You know what their mentality is more than anything, because the game plan has changed but generally the culture of the country and of the players is quite uniform for that country and it doesn’t really tend to vary much over the years.

“I mean, playing against New Zealand, they pretty much have the same kind of mentality all the time, though they might change the way they’re playing. The Springboks have changed over the last few years, but I’m keen to learn what they’re like. It would be a good sort of thing to get under your belt to make you a better player.”

He’s pretty philosophical about the injuries that have interrupted his career, for he is no different from the vast majority in this sport. What annoys him more, really, is the niggling injuries that have nagged and gnawed at him this season.

Having recovered from his elbow injury, a torn calf in the first pre-season friendly in Portugal sidelined him for September. You’d hardly have noticed with a typically full-on Flannery performance against Northampton, and the following Monday in training he set several personal bests.

“It was my mother’s birthday and we went out for dinner and I was sitting there and I was going: ‘That’s brilliant now and it’s all set up, you know, Thomond Park, at home this weekend, 26,000 people, to play in the Heineken Cup for Munster. We’ll bust some Italians this week. Everything is just going perfect’, I said.

“The next day, 40 minutes into training my calf went in the lineout. I was sitting in the dressingroom and Barry Murphy came in to me and he says: ‘Are you all right?’, and I said ‘I just don’t know how I can keep doing this’,” he recalls. “But that’s just that little window of ‘Oh poor me’ and then you go: ‘****, things could be a lot worse’.”

He’s aware that, like many players, at times he’s too driven for his own good and the calf injury was due to doing too much lower body work to compensate for the lack of upper body work he could do during his rehabilitation from the elbow and shoulder operations.

“I should have more cop on than this at this stage but that’s just the nature of it,” he admits, sighing. “You’re just always trying to push it and push it and if I wasn’t like this . . .” The thought trails off but the conclusion is obvious. He wouldn’t be Jerry Flannery.

He’s obviously quite philosophical about most things, and a mentally and physically resilient, resourceful lad. He’s had worse blows than missing out on the Lions, and is still particularly irked by the one suspension he received for standing on Julien Bonnaire’s head in Munster’s Heineken Cup tie away to Clermont in January ’08, because it was, as he explained to the disciplinary committee, a genuine “hand on heart” accident. And he was furious he had effectively been called a liar, as he saw it.

Recompense came by way of the 2008 Heineken Cup win, his second with Munster. That came, he said, even though Munster had scratched their way to the final, which made losing the Heineken Cup semi-final to Leinster all the worse, as like most of his team-mates, he had never felt Munster had played better until that game.

He’s his own worst enemy, and can push himself too hard. “I know I need to relax and stop doing it . . . but the thing is growing up and loads of fellas who’d be competing for my position would be bigger than me or might be stronger. But I’d say, and I think Donncha O’Callaghan is the same, ‘we’ll outwork ye, you might naturally be 16st but I’m going to get over 16st by working harder than you’. But there’s tolls to that.”

Gerry Hussey, the ex-boxer turned psychologist who has worked with Munster, has been a help. When Hussey speaks of going into the ring against bigger men, Flannery can identify with that. “He said ‘the minute I walk in the ring and a fella hits me there’s two reactions, you either get the f*** out of there or you get back into him’. Instant respect from a rugby team after that. I’ve only sat down with him once or twice, I thought it was interesting because it gave me a little parallel to . . . the injuries, but I just have to be philosophical and say ‘injuries happen, man’ you know what I mean? That’s it.”

Top bloke and great talker though he is, you’d almost think that such an intense rugby player would have little outside rugby, but you’d be wrong.

Having turned 31 last month, and though in the first of a three-year deal with Munster, he’s more mindful of life after the game. He’s developing his bar in Limerick and has become involved in a marketing company called Impact Media. Nonetheless, rugby remains, as he describes it, the bread and butter.

Trips to visit new girlfriend Katy in London also keeps him busy.

That infuriating suspension from the 2008 Six Nations made him realise there were only so many opportunities left to win things. It made him greedy.

“I was thinking I really want the Magners League and I really want the Heineken Cup and then I want a Lions tour and then I thought to myself next year could be a problem with motivation if I win all this stuff but I’m going to deal with that when I get there. Excuse me . . . but that’s where I was thinking like, be as greedy as you can. I wanted everything.”

Eh, you did enjoy winning the Grand Slam, didn’t you? He laughs at the little bit of madness within him. “Paulie talks about it. It’s like there’s that nagging feeling you have all the time, we have to win, have to win. There’s like a rock on your neck you know?” And to illustrate his point he leans forward and places an imaginary rock on the back of his neck.

“And then when you get to May, and you’ve won the Heineken Cup it’s like you just take it off,” he says, and removes the imaginary rock and places it down on the table.

He consoles himself that this must have been the mentality in the Leicester mindset as they hoovered up trophies. “I see it’s in Munster, I can see it’s there in Leinster now, in the Leinster players you know and it’s a good thing that it’s there.”

Which, in turn, is good for Ireland: “It reinforces in players that what they’re doing is right, and I can see how the Leinster players have bought into it and they’ve taken ownership of the team. Munster is where I am and I want Munster to do well but I respect what Leinster have done.

“And when I finish up my parents will still want to go to every single Munster match. All our families support Munster, all our friends support Munster and they will, after we retire. I suppose that’s just one of the good things about Munster. I have to get a 10-year ticket, man.”

FLANNERY ON THE LIONS

THIS IS Flannery’s first Test against the Springboks. He’d had his shoulder reconstructed when the countries last met in November ’06 and, of course, he missed the Lions tour. The Lions’ 39-man squad came together on Monday, May 18th, and within 48 hours Flannery had sustained torn ligaments in his left elbow.

A curse had afflicted Munster’s eight-strong representation almost from the moment the squad had been announced, beginning with Tomás O’Leary’s ruptured ankle against the Scarlets the ensuing Friday in Musgrave Park.

“After the game just going back in the car, going back to Limerick and there was just this cloud. And rugby is a selfish sport. People tend to bounce on. It’s not like we had to bring in some guy from the Academy. We’d Peter Stringer to come in so it’s not like I was worried about the team. Just for Tomás. I felt so bad for him.”

Then there was the cloud hanging over Alan Quinlan in the fall-out from the Heineken Cup semi-final and his ensuing suspension. Life went on, Flannery noticing how, typically and understandably, every player “is purely about themselves”.

The exception was Paul O’Connell. “Paulie was the only guy who was encompassing everyone, I guess because he’s captain, but that’s the way he is all the time.”

Flannery was especially looking forward to working with Shaun Edwards and Warren Gatland. “I’ll learn loads here,” he kept thinking to himself.

On the second day of training Flannery was in defence for a continuity drill. “Stephen Jones threw a miss-pass and Lee Byrne went on my outside and I kind of locked on to his arm as he went past. Jamie Roberts came in from inside me and hit the inside of my elbow and I just remember seeing my arm just sort of snap the other way. I heard a big huge crack and I just went ‘aaah’. It’s hard to even realise it’s happening. It’s kind of like a dream . . . ”

“In fairness the medical staff were class. Prav (Mathema), the Wasps physio, brought me in and my arm was flapping all over the place.” After a long wait for an MRI scan Flannery sought out the Lions physio. “Prav said ‘It looks like your tour is over. You’ve ripped all the tendon off your funny bone and taken some of the bone with it and you’ve snapped the ligament in your elbow there so it looks like your tour is over. It’s gonna require surgery’. He was pretty upfront and I appreciated that.”

Within two days he had an operation and availed of the time out to also have his troublesome shoulder taken care of. The only time he was down in the dumps was returning to Limerick and going out for a few pints the day the Lions departed. Then it hit him, whereupon Declan Kidney invited himself and O’Leary along to the Churchill Cup in Denver. “That was the best thing ever because I never realised the hell Tomás was in.”

He didn’t watch the Lions tour. “No, not really. Again it’s like that kind of selfish buzz. Like the minute my tour was over I wanted the Irish lads to do really well. I wanted the Lions to win the tour. I specifically wanted Paulie to be a Lions-winning Test captain and I looked at someone like Earlsy and thought this guy’s is going to be like a sponge. That’s what I wanted from the tour, so I watched the first game but after that I didn’t really watch them because I was on my own, then I was over in Denver and I said ‘look the Lions Tour is one thing, I want to get back and win things for Munster and Ireland next year’. I did watch a few of the games and it looked like a really class experience but it wasn’t for me so I just move on.”