A good bagman is a team’s prized asset

Paddy O’Reilly, or ‘Rala’ as the Irish rugby team calls him, has been Ireland’s bagman for the last 20 years and ‘Baggage Master’, an uppity title he dislikes, for the Lions on their last two tours.

Coaches and players – “not wishing to single out individuals,” as Rala would say, “but people like the Claw” [Peter Clohessy] – may come and go, but he’s a constant, the common denominator at players’ weddings. At 66 years old, he’s kept at his station on a rolling, one-year-contract basis. No one wants to let him go. “Kit man, confidant, itinerary king, friend to one and all,” as Brian O’Driscoll describes him in his autobiography.

Captain’s armband

A good bagman is a team's prized asset. When Kilkenny's Tommy Walsh called time on his intercounty career, he name-checked only one person from Kilkenny's backroom staff in his departing speech – kit man Denis 'Rackard' Coady. The last thing Robbie Keane does before leading out the Irish soccer team is to ask the kit manager, Dick Redmond, to put on his captain's armband.

Ostensibly, the bagman’s job is to lug gear about the place. Rackard Coady arrived on the scene with the Kilkenny seniors almost 40 years ago as a hurley carrier. In essence, the bagman is a fixer, and, as for the Irish rugby team, a smuggler of Barry’s Tea around the world (usually in a sock).

"I offer services like the butler in Downton Abbey," says O'Reilly. "There's more and more equipment with the evolvement of the game, and the management has grown, but the principle is the same thing, going back to when I was bagman for Terenure or Leinster.

"To me, a training session is as important as a game. You have to have what I call the Big Five – footballs, bibs, cones, drinks and shields. It's like the five big animals in Africa – the lion, leopard, elephant, rhino and water buffalo. I make sure I have those five items in the van. After that, you work around that with studs, whistles, blankets, spare playing kit and so on."

The “so on” chiefly includes keeping morale up. On the eve of an international, his room is a haven from coaches and management. The rule is no rugby talk. Players pop in and out. O’Driscoll used to try to be the last to drop by at around 11pm. Donncha O’Callaghan said it was “like going to your granny’s where you could be yourself instead of a professional rugby player”.

Duct tape

O’Reilly can also be a foil for pranks. He’s been mummified in hotel bed sheets and duct tape and shoved up and down more hotel elevators than he cares to recall. “You can’t play a Saturday match on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,” he explains. “It’s too mentally wearing, so players welcome distractions – and I’m often on the receiving end.”

It would be naïve, however, to think of O’Reilly as an innocent. He has a handy way for rousing hungover players the day after an away international – he goes into their rooms, turns up the volume on the TV full blast and disappears with the remote control.

He's always the first to the training ground and the last to leave. The day of a match, he is up early, as he likes to be at the ground seven or eight hours before kick-off to organise things (although international colleagues squeeze the work into a couple of hours). He usually breakfasts alone, although he remembers on the morning of Ireland's clash with Wales at Cardiff in 2005, David Humphreys joined him for some toast and porridge. Few words were exchanged.

O’Reilly says there are times when players will look to chat and others when they will be preoccupied. He will usually wait for them to initiate conversation. In the dressingroom before a game, some will have headphones on, some will chat quietly and others will be lost in their thoughts.

Players have their match-day rituals and traditions. He puts a comb in Jamie Heaslip's spot ("the more weird the better"). John Hayes used to like him to leave out a red apple with his kit. On Lions duty, George North and Stephen Jones favoured a little tub of wine gums.

One of the fitness coaches with the Lions got on O'Reilly's case for leaving a sleeve of Ferrero Rocher in the corner for English prop Matt Stevens, among others, after a game. "We're trying to get the weight off them and you're giving them Ferrero Rocher," he said, but O'Reilly didn't think it would do any harm.

Redmond says the Irish soccer team lads “go mad without their Nivea packs – face cream, shaving cream, shampoo, deodorant; they love them.”

Charlie O'Leary, who was bagman during the Jack Charlton era, remembers that Ray Houghton used to like to bathe his boots in warm water before a game.

Before All-Ireland hurling finals, Rackard Coady will get someone going to Lourdes or Medjugorje to bring back 50 holy medals. "I'd slip them in their hand the Friday night before an All-Ireland," he says. "To a man, they'd put them in their togs or down their socks."

Carting the team's gear around would test the mind of an army's quartermaster general. Jack Kiely, who has been the Munster rugby team's kit man since 2002, says mid-June is his busiest time. It's when he has to sort the gear for the coming season.

“When we get all the new kit it – socks, shorts, polo shirts, training jerseys, to know all the players sizes, from 3XL to small – all of it has to be bagged, with the different squad number on each bag. It’s a big wheelie bag, not a plastic bag. You’d have about 43 players plus management. You’re looking at the bones of 60 people to be kitted out, nearly 15 pallets of stuff. It takes about a week and a half.”

Vincent Linnane, who looks after the kit for the Kerry Gaelic football team, always sleeps with the team's jerseys in his room the night before a match in case of theft. He nearly ran aground on the morning of this year's drawn All-Ireland semi-final against Mayo at Croke Park – the kit van broke down at 7am.

Local garage

“I got in touch with the county board,” he says. “They were very helpful. We got someone from a local garage, who does our vans for us to open up, and they obliged us by coming out and replacing the broken-down van with another van. It was a bit of panic stations for a while, but if you didn’t get those hiccups you wouldn’t realise you were in the job at all. I’m actually a Mayo man. That worried me – we were playing Mayo and if I didn’t get to Croke Park with the gear I was wondering what the press would say the following day.”

Redmond, and his fellow kit man Mick Lawlor, had a job shifting the gear from the kit van to the dressingroom before Ireland's Euro 2016 qualifier in Gelsenkirchen in October.

"The Aviva Stadium is so easy to unload 20 skips and bring them into the dressingrooms," says Redmond. "When we were at Schalke's ground playing Germany, it was horrendous. There was a 500-yard walk and then busting a gut up the middle of a ramp of about 20 steps. Coming back down the ramp after the game was a nightmare."

It was not hell, however. Ireland played Turkey in Istanbul in 1991. It was the last match of the qualifying campaign for Euro '92. Bags of urine and a dead cat rained down on the Irish team bench when Ireland's third goal flew in towards the end of a 3-1 victory.

Meeting with the Pope

"Anywhere else it was very organised and you would arrive by coach and go straight into the ground," says O'Leary, 91 in February, who was bagman that night. "In Turkey, we arrived and we were left outside the ground with the spectators. Monsignor Boyle – who lives in Limerick West and followed the team everywhere, it was him who organised the meeting with the Pope at Italia '90 – was a great help to me.

“When the players made their way into the ground, he had to stay back outside minding the equipment because I had to make two runs and only had the one trolley. There was a massive crowd outside. They were there for no good.

“You couldn’t take your eye off the gear. There was absolutely no police control at all. The police were of no help. In fact, they were a hindrance. I saw the police interfering – they had knives cutting the bags, trying to search the bags. When we got underneath the stands coming out, they put all the lights out under the stand so we had to find our way in the dark.”

Windsor Park

It was the only time O'Leary, who was bagman from 1986 until a few months before the 2002 World Cup finals, says he felt intimidated at a match. It was worse even than the infamous World Cup qualifier against Northern Ireland at Windsor Park in 1993. "In fairness to Northern Ireland, we were expecting hostility and we were protected. From the time we arrived in Northern Ireland for the training sessions we were safeguarded thoroughly. On match day, we had armed guards on the coach with us and drove straight into the ground. The only difference with any other match was that we always played rebel songs on the coach on the way up, but the armed guards forbade us. They said, 'Would you cut those out, please?'"

It was O'Leary's brief to look after the music. There was no Dancing Queen on his mixed tapes. "You would soon know whether they liked a song or not," he says. "I would scrub it for the next match and another one would be put in. I had two tapes with me. One tape was all Luke Kelly songs and your man Moore [Christy Moore].

“Going to Lansdowne, I’d come to around Haddington Road, and I’d stop that tape and I’d put on the other tape – Seán South of Garryowen. Just as we’d be arriving in the ground, we’d be at the crescendo of Seán South of Garryowen. So the lads would be really worked up by that time. They’d be singing at the top of their voices.” The CD ‘Rackard is the Man’ is on sale in record stores. All proceeds go towards Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital, Crumlin.