RWC 2015: Ireland's Peter O’Mahony charging in to his first World Cup

It can't be easy for those closest to Peter O'Mahony to watch him play. He doesn't seem to know the meaning of the word fear. Joe Schmidt has often ventured that O'Mahony has little or no respect for his body, such is the flanker's capacity to throw himself into the fray.

Will Greenwood, in nominating O'Mahony on his team of the Six Nations last season, wrote of the Ireland flanker: "If all the wild horsemen of the apocalypse came around the corner O'Mahony would charge straight back at them."

Nicely put, and O’Mahony laughs on being told that one, before self-deprecatingly joking: “Probably due to my stupidity more than anything.”

But he wouldn’t know any other way.

“It’s the way I play. I’d probably be useless if I didn’t carry on like that. You’re there in a team. You’ve got to be abrasive. It’s a position where you don’t have much thinking time. Rob Penny used to use the phrase ‘the coalface of the game’. If you’re not at the first breakdown, you’re at the second, and you’ve just got to make decisions off the cuff. You have to mind yourself as well, but when it comes to the 80 minutes, you’ve just got to put your head down over it.”

‘Chasing turnovers’

He doesn’t know why he plays the way he does, where his no-holds-barred commitment comes from. “I’ve always liked the physicality, but I would like to think I’ve improved my decision-making around the breakdown. I might have been chasing turnovers when I was younger, trying to get as much involvement as I could in every breakdown, whereas now you’re learning to pick your ruck rather than putting your head down and hitting whatever’s in front of you. And I think I’m a smarter rugby player as a result.”

He attributes this to experience, good coaching and the way the game has evolved. “Teams are so good at attacking that if you have four or five or six numbers in a ruck, you’re going to be seriously struggling somewhere else.”

He's had his share of injuries, perhaps partly as a result, but it was curious to hear Shane Jennings venture that O'Mahony was held together by Sellotape.

O’Mahony hadn’t heard of this observation. “I know my body better than anyone and I’ve had probably the best pre-season I’ve ever had in my career. They’ve all been staggered, with kind of little niggly injuries, but this pre-season I didn’t have any. I had my shoulders done last summer and I tore my hip flexor at the end of last season, but I worked hard on my body in the off-season, and I was the freshest I’ve ever been coming into a pre-season. This would have been the best returns I ever got.”

Not the biggest backrower in the world, O’Mahony has bulked up again this summer. Four years ago, his playing weight was around 100 kilograms, whereas he’s about 107-108kg now.

Vivid memory

O’Mahony’s most vivid, initial

World Cup

memory, when he was five years old, is the 1995 tournament, and specifically Jonah Lomu. “My first superstar. That would have been my first memories of the World Cup.”

O’Mahony was just about to start out in Cork Con’s legendary underage set-up, where Fred Casey has coached for over half a century. “He coached my oul’ fella, he coached me, and he coached my two brothers [Mark and Cian]. I swear.”

New Zealand came to Ireland in 1997, and South Africa a year later.

“The Springboks stayed in the Metropole and I met [/GARY/]Teichmann and James Dalton and [Joost] van der Westhuizen, and had photographs taken with them. It was a big deal to meet the world champions. Good memories.”

The Munster captain himself wasn't on the Irish radar at the time of the last World Cup. O'Mahony woke early to watch all the Ireland games at home on television. "I had a few of the lads over to the house and watched it with the old fella," he says in reference to his dad, John, a long-time Cork Con player and stalwart behind the scenes. Watching Conor Murray in that World Cup was particularly good to see for his Muster A team-mate of the season before.

However, the absence of 10 Munster team-mates gave him his provincial opening. He had only started two games for Munster prior to the 2011 World Cup, but during it he played in Munster’s first six League games and captained them five times. That he was only 21 when Tony McGahan handed him this honour ably demonstrates the faith which the then Munster coach had in his leadership qualities.

“I really enjoyed when the lads were away, because that’s when a lot of us got game time. I captained the lads, my first time captaining the Munster senior team, for the first five or six games, and we won five of the first six. So it would have been a good time for me.

“A lot of the group that are there now would have started during that World Cup. We had a good B&I Cup team,” he says. Indeed, as well as Murray, Simon Zebo, Stephen Archer, David Kilcoyne, Duncan Casey, Dave O’Callaghan, Dave Foley, Billy Holland, Tommy O’Donnell and O’Mahony had played on the Munster A side the previous season.

On foot of his run in the team during September and October 2011, O’Mahony not only became a regular for Munster, he even broke into the Ireland squad in the 2012 Six Nations, making his debut off the bench at home to Italy on the second weekend.

Even he was a little surprised. “I had a holiday booked to New York during the Six Nations and had to cancel,” he chuckles, “much to my girlfriend’s upset. Jessica was quite upset over it, while I was obviously over the moon.”

Fast-forward four years, and he’s played almost 100 games for province and country since the start of that season.

Much to learn

“I’ve still a lot to learn, though. Obviously I’m a different person and rugby player. But it’s still my first World Cup, so I still don’t really know what to expect, I still have a huge amount of excitement for it. It’s a competition every kid wants to play in.”

It’s interesting to hear him first stress that, at 25, and with a century of first-class games under his belt, he maintains he has much to learn.

“There’s guys here like Paulie, who has, like, 110 caps [111 including seven Lions’ Tests]. He has three of my careers, maybe even four, and you’re never finished. He’s still learning. It doesn’t matter who you are, you’re still learning. You still need to keep on top of things and keep moving forward.”

As if to underline the point, whereas O’Mahony is playing in his first World Cup, O’Connell is playing in his fourth. As Munster captain as well, those are some shoes to fill too.

“He’s an incredible captain, and a good friend of mine. He’s given me a lot of guidance throughout the years. Even when he was away at the last World Cup he’d give a text or a phone call to say ‘well done’, or to keep an eye out for something.

“I’ve been very lucky to play a lot of my career with him, and because of the numbers on our backs I’ve sat next to him a huge amount in dressing-rooms. You just listen to the man when he speaks. You look at what he does on the pitch. There’s a lot of things you’d love to emulate, but still you’d like to have your own stamp on it. But certainly a good fella to have beside you and look up to.”

Belief

O’Connell having captained Ireland to successive Six Nations’ titles gives the squad belief that they can make an impact on this World Cup like no other Irish team before them.

The accompanying expectation from the Irish public has often not sat well in the past, but this will also help to swell support, and, as was evident four years ago, that’s no bad thing.

“We have to have some of the best supporters in the world and the fact that it’s only going to be over the pond will probably make it a bit crazy for us. But it’s something that we really enjoy and we get a huge lift from during games.

“Sure, there is an expectation there, but I think it is a realistic expectation from everyone. They want us to do well but they know we have to take it game by game.”

As for himself, and what he hopes to bring to his first World Cup, O’Mahony says: “I just want to do as well as I can for the team and everyone I represent, I suppose. It’s been a long time coming and you could get carried away with it, but you just want to put yourself in the best shape to play as well as you can for everyone that matters.

“You’d want at the end of it to say that we played to our potential. That’s what you want to say. You can’t put a game on that, or base it on how far we want to get. But if we can look ourselves in the mirror and say we played as well as we can and there was no lock left unturned or there was nothing else I could have done, then you’ll be in a good place.”