INTERVIEW ANDREW TRIMBLE: Gerry Thornleytalks to the Ulster player who came of age during the Southern Hemisphere tour in the summer
THERE ARE few more engaging players on the rugby circuit than Andrew Trimble. Polite and self-deprecating, it’s actually no surprise to learn that he used to be quite shy, or that when he arrived into the Irish camp there was a time when he might even have been a little awe-struck. But not any more. It’s not quite a case of No More Mr Nice Guy, but it’s a remodelled Andrew Trimble nonetheless.
Perhaps he was too reserved for his own good. In any event, something clicked on the summer tour to New Zealand and Australia, his performances shining amid the grimness of that first Test hammering especially, when only the tightest of TMO calls denied him the try he deserved.
Full of power and desire, what caught the eye was his much-improved footwork and handling, though the way he tells it, it was as much a mental transformation as anything. He is not a born-again Christian, merely a devout Christian, but he looked reborn as a rugby player that night in New Plymouth.
“I think when I was on tour I just thought ‘stuff it I’m just going to get out there and just try and do all the things that I haven’t been doing over the last sort of year and a half’.
“And I just wanted to get my leg drive right, I wanted to get my feet right, I just really wanted to work hard, trying to get the ball in my hands, be confident, force myself to be confident and just try and impose myself on the All Blacks.
“The way it worked out we were getting hammered but I still wanted to get involved and almost force myself to be confident. So I managed to do that. I managed to get back to feeling like whenever I got the ball in my hands I was going to beat someone and as a winger that’s massively important.”
What prompted this? “I was just sick of not getting chances or playing reasonably well for Ulster and then not getting involved. I really wanted to take that chance. I didn’t get involved last week against South Africa so I was a bit disappointed and especially being the 24th man and training right through and doing the warm-up and then nothing at the end of it. I just wanted to get out there and play some rugby.”
A star of the Irish schools and under-age system – he was probably the stand-out player of his generation – Trimble always had raw pace and power, but admits he had to work on his footwork and handling, all the more so when the knee injury which truncated and affected his 2008-09 season – during which he didn’t play for Ireland once – obliged him to work on other aspects of his game.
But, he maintains, applying this was as much the product of improved desire and confidence, all the more so, he admits candidly, when moving into the more rarified air of the Irish set-up. “At Ulster I feel like I can get involved okay. There’s guys looking for me. Down here you’re a smaller fish and all of a sudden you have to just force yourself to get into the game and get into positions where maybe you’re not that comfortable but you just have to get used to it and get comfortable with it.”
All the more so with what he describes as the “devastating” amount of talent on the wings. This prompts a further confession. First capped against Australia five years ago this week, Trimble admits he may have been a little fortunate to have won all of his 26 caps by the end of the Eddie O’Sullivan reign.
“I remember in the past, back to 2005, for the next couple of years I remember I wasn’t playing that well but I managed to just get involved. Eddie sort of gave me the benefit of the doubt quite often and now there are so many young guys. I call them young guys but like they’re younger than me,” he says, laughing.
“That’s devastating! But there are guys playing really, really class rugby and you have to be playing out of your skin if you’re going to get a chance, and that’s the way it should be and that’s going to bring the best out of everybody.”
More interested in football growing up, if it wasn’t for the, eh, encouragement of his father Maurice, an ex-backrower with Academy – the club for Belfast Royal Academy old boys – he might never have taken up rugby. “My dad forced me to go to the (underage) rugby training at Coleraine. He confiscated my Premier League annual and replaced it with an Irish rugby annual or whatever it was at the time.
The youngest, or “the runt of the litter” as he puts it, of three, that he has two older sisters (Angela and Alison) may partly explain his father’s keen interest in his son’s sporting activities.
“Quite a lot of people have been saying recently that finally my dad’s going to be proud of me because I’ve brought a bit of a physical aspect or an edge maybe to my game recently. That’s something I think my dad would have been known for; no skills, no pace, nothing, just hard,” he says, laughing again, and thanking his dad “for his genes and encouragement”.
A self-professed late developer, Trimble says he only came good in his last two years at Coleraine Inst, breaking into the Irish Schools team in his last year and progressing to the Irish under-21s in the World Cup six years ago. Good, comparatively carefree years.
“Actually Johnny Sexton was (also) in Mendoza in Argentina for the World Cup and we were sort of chatting the other night, sharing stories about Mendoza and there was so much banter, so much craic. We weren’t that good, we weren’t that good at all. We were terrible but we just had great craic. Everybody got on really well. Those were good days actually.”
However, in the previous season, his first year in the Ulster academy, his career hit a bump. In defence, especially, he struggled. Mark McCall identified skills in his game that he needed to improve. “Mark saw that socially I was quite quiet as well, I was very shy or whatever at 19/20. He gave me a development contract for the next year even though in my mind there were people ahead of me. But he knew that being in that environment day-in day-out would, socially, help me to come out of my shell and from a rugby perspective as well. That really meant a lot that Mark gave me that chance.”
That was 2004-05, and after a year playing with Ballymena in the AIL and training with Ulster, he had a big pre-season to the following campaign. Breaking immediately into the Ulster team, he made his Irish debut at outside centre in the absence of Brian O’Driscoll in the desultory 30-14 defeat at home to Australia in the autumn series, though he scored two tries the following week against Romania.
Of his 21 starts, 11 have been on the left wing, seven in midfield and three on the right wing, but last summer’s tour were his first back-to-back games since the 2008 Six Nations. The following season was a write off for Ireland.
“I was losing the raw pace, the raw leg drive, my power – my figures in the gym were down. I was just struggling with this knee and I just hated doing weights because I knew it hurt it and I was just finding it really hard to get into games because of that.
“So then I knew I wouldn’t get picked for Ireland. Deccie would say it, you know bring me in and say ‘oh you’re not involved this weekend’ and I’d say ‘fair enough because I’m not playing well enough’ and missing the Grand Slam really got me.
“But that was the year I got married as well so you know it . . . at the same time if there was going to be a year where I had that it was going to be that year, you know, where on the pitch it was . . . I had a shocker and off the pitch life was good.”
He and Anna had become friends three years before they became a couple, having met while both were part of a sports outreach team in South Africa in the summer of 2004. “I had been to South Africa once before, just enjoyed it, and I wanted to try and use my sport to work with kids and stuff.”
Trimble had heard of the sports outreach trip to Soweto through several of his friends in Coleraine, who worked with an organisation called Exodus.
“There were 12 or 13 of us and we spent time there and played football, cricket and rugby with them . . . I was 19, I was the oldest and so it felt like I was a bit of a team leader or whatever.
“There’s a friend of mine I went to school with and he works out there in the same organisation, not Exodus but the organisation that we hooked up with out there and he’s a coach, he coaches a team from the township and stuff and so I’ve just been out to visit him and his wife and I’m the patron of the charity or the organisation. They actually brought a football team over to Northern Ireland about a month and a half ago and won all their games.”
Trimble was about 16 when he decided to deepen his Christianity, as opposed to rediscovering God. “I always went to church, but when I was 16 or 17 I decided this means a lot to me and this is something that I want to invest in. Since then it’s been a big part of my life. A lot of my relationships and friends are all based on that so it’s important.
“It’s just a mindset or a perspective. Whenever I’m dropped or things aren’t going your way you know, that this is more important to me, and not to get carried away. I think just having a relationship with God as well, that sounds a wee bit wishy washy or faffy, but it’s important and it means a lot to me.”
The slagging from team-mates has eased off, though just to make sure we don’t think of him as “a hippie” or “a weirdo”, he stresses: “Being a Christian, I think I’ve got a bit of a responsibility because I feel like God has given me an ability to maximise it and you’ve a fair bit of responsibility in that respect; not necessarily be soft or be a stereotypical Christian but be someone who is aggressive, confrontational and works really hard for their team-mates.”
Maybe it helps him through the pain barrier as well. It transpires he suffered a fractured finger on his right hand – which remains crooked and bent into the finger next to it – against New Zealand, and played with it against Australia. Indeed, it was not diagnosed until he returned to pre-season, and he still has to strap it before games. “It’s actually not as bad as I thought it would be. It looks horrendous but it’s alright.”
With his wife Anna on a six-week placement in Uganda as part of her final year in medicine, in the interim Trimble also went on four weeks’ holidays, taking in Madrid, San Sebastian, Biarritz and, for three days, the Pamplona festival, which took in the night Spain won the World Cup, with an estimated two million revellers in Pamplona alone.
“It’s a two-week long festival but we were there for three days and we were exhausted. I don’t know how you can go for any longer to be honest. But it was great craic. I was with mates from home whom I hadn’t seen in a while actually.
“There’s just a big, massive square in the middle and then the bull run sort of runs alongside it but you know the square packed out with completely hammered Spaniards! We were the soberest people there.”
Having played so well in the summer Tests, during his holidays he would have nurtured hopes of starting against the Springboks but today he hopes to bring the new mindset to bear anyway.
“You can whine and moan you know if you don’t get your opportunity but if you get a chance and you don’t take you know that’s your fault.”
His thinking is more clear-cut nowadays.
