GERRY THORNLEYtalks to Tomás O'Leary about his journey to the position as number one Irish scrum-half
STARTING OFF, Tomás O’Leary admits he dreamed of playing in red at Croke Park. At least he scratched that itch in leading his county’s minor Gaelic hurlers to All-Ireland glory at Croke Park, but even then the early rugby dreams revolved around wearing red. Green and a funny-shaped ball didn’t enter his head.
Even as the Red Army was invented, and Munster’s Magnificent Obsession took hold, making his Ireland debut against the All Blacks in Jones’s Road would have seemed like the stuff of fantasy. Nevertheless, he had enough of the rugby bug in his teenage years to know the Six Nations was something special. That it came with a win, against a French side running from everywhere, made it better still. Last Tuesday he was still chuffed, using the word “great” three times in one sentence to describe last Saturday.
Now Rome. This truly is a long way from his formative years. The pity for O’Leary and Ireland, undoubtedly, is that Nick Mallett didn’t have his daft-as-a-brush notion about trying to convert a 29-year-old flanker into a scrumhalf a week later. O’Leary is not remotely inclined to criticise or be sympathetic towards the plight of Mauro Bergamasco last week. Even so, like any scrumhalf, there must have been a part of O’Leary that was grateful all those hours of repetitive practice since he took up rugby at 14 hadn’t been made virtually redundant.
“YOU NEVER want to wish anyone else any bad, but it’s a position you have to work hard on and it’s a position with specific skills, passing and kicking, particularly as you go up to a higher level, and it does takes a lot of time and effort. But I suppose you get more satisfaction when you improve then. When I first started playing I was 14 or 15. The oval ball was kinda different from what I was used to but you just have to have time and perseverance to get used to the skills.”
Needless to say, as even the dogs in Piazza Navona are probably aware by now, he’s the son of Seánie, winner of four senior All-Ireland hurling medals and a three-time All Star, the first three of those titles at the ground his son adorned last week and the last in Thurles in 1984 – the GAA’s centenary year. His father retired then, a year after Tomás was born. “I’ve seen bits and pieces on video and stuff.”
His father doesn’t like to hog any of his son’s limelight, and while Seánie doesn’t pretend to be an expert on rugby, he has passed on useful advice on how to deal with high-pressure games. “He never really coached me, so he never really got too animated on the sidelines with me. I probably wouldn’t have listened to him if he did,” quips O’Leary, “but he’s always been a calming influence. The same with my mother. They’ve been good influences on my career.”
Having been to St Patrick’s Boys School in Gardner’s Hill where, like most primary schools, rugby was non-existent and hurling, GAA football and soccer were the sports, O’Leary was sent to CBC Cork, largely for geographical reasons.
Initially, with his natural speed, O’Leary played a few games on the wing before being moved closer to the action by “one of the teachers”. He can’t remember who was responsible, perhaps out of diplomacy. “There’s a couple of them fighting over it now. Either Russell Foley or Tony Wall, they’re both claiming it, so I’ll leave it between them to fight that one out,” he says with a smile.
He continued to play hurling and football with Erin’s Own until he was 19, playing with the Cork minor hurling team for two years and captaining them to an All-Ireland title in 2001 at the age of 17. He then played a year with the county’s under-21s.
Meantime, he and rugby quickly took a hold of each other. In his second season, the Christians’ juniors beat Rockwell in the Munster final at Thomond Park. In his senior cup year he had less joy, being obliged to play at outhalf in a semi-final defeat to bitter rivals Pres. “Murray Kidd and Peter Melia were coaching us and they got a notion I could play outhalf. Duncan Williams, who is in Munster at the moment, was in fourth year and we had no real outhalf, so they threw me in there. The goalkicking wasn’t great and we lost, partly due to my goalkicking,” he recalls with a wry but broadening smile. “Well, mainly due to my goalkicking.”
His father didn’t put the slightest pressure on him to focus more on his hurling or football. “There was certainly a bit of pressure from some hurling people, just the diehards really, but my mam and dad encouraged me to go for it. I talked with them, and I wanted to play for Munster and play professional rugby, and they were delighted I had that ambition. I knew myself, and they knew, that worst-case scenario, you’d give it three or four years and you’re still only 22-23. You can always go back hurling.
“My grandmother, my dad’s mum, probably would have been the most disappointed, but she’s a massive rugby fan now. I’d say she never watched a game of rugby in her life until a couple of years ago but at least she saw me play minor for Cork.”
THE YEAR BEFORE that All-Ireland minor success, he’d been on a losing team in the final against Galway, so there was the additional revenge in denying Galway a three in a row. “We had a brilliant team. We had John Gardiner, who has gone on to play for Cork, and Shane Murphy, Cian O’Connor and the two Ciarán Murphys, and Setanta Ó hAilpín was on that team as well. So we had a very good outfit. It wasn’t a brilliant game but we won by three or four points, just got the win basically, but it was a brilliant win.”
And the, eh, current mess/impasse/ imbroglio in Cork hurling? Needless to say, he has to toe a fairly diplomatic line amid such a political minefield, though understandably you sense his sympathies are with the players, some of whom are former Rebel team-mates from his minor days.
“There’s a fair few Cork lads (in the Irish squad) and we get a lot of slagging from the rest of them. It’s a right mess. Everybody wants to see Cork with the best team on the pitch and challenging for an All-Ireland. I don’t think Cork or Tipperary will challenge Kilkenny without a full side. Obviously Gerald (McCarthy) might be doing his best and he wants all the players there as well to challenge, but it doesn’t look like both parties can work together any more.”
O’Leary’s early sporting days would be fairly commonplace and he says his Gaelic-playing days were “a great place to develop your skills; speed, hand-eye co-ordination.” Even so, the balancing act was proving difficult. Not alone had he his Erin’s Own hurling and football sides and his Christians rugby sides, but there were county underage teams and the Munster and the Irish Schools sides to further complicate things. Understanding from coaches in all codes was required. “When you’re young you don’t really think about burn-out, you’re full of energy. Overall, it was great, and I definitely wouldn’t change it.”
But it was almost a relief having a gun pointing to his head, albeit in the form of an offer of a year with the IRFU Academy. He was 19. It was decision time. Quite candidly, he admits: “The fact there was an opportunity to play professional rugby if you were lucky enough was the defining factor. I love rugby and I loved it at that stage as well, but I loved hurling and football just as much. The over-riding factor was that I could be a professional athlete.”
Munster were taking off too, though an early landmark came at the Under-21 World Cup in Scotland in 2004, when an Irish team featuring himself, Jamie Heaslip, Tommy Bowe and Denis Fogarty, beat France and Australia en route to the final before losing to New Zealand. “That opened my eyes that we weren’t a million miles away from the top nations and from gaining professional contracts.”
He takes pleasure in seeing his team-mates from that tournament breaking through as well. As to why it took him so long? He smiles and sums it up in two words. Peter Stringer. “Strings has been a great player and is still playing great stuff. You’re not going to get rid of a player like Peter Stringer. He’s a legend of Munster and Irish rugby, the most capped scrumhalf in Irish history. So I had to be patient but I think my game has come on more because I had to work harder behind Peter, and to have him at training, you’re learning bits from him too. So I think it’s been beneficial for me.”
DESCRIBED AS a relatively quiet if good-humoured presence in the Munster dressingroom, O’Leary is a dedicated and driven son of Munster. Last season, his third with them, was his breakthrough year, although the season before, 2006-07, he was virtually an ever-present in the Magners League. Of his three Heineken Cup starts before last season, one had been on the wing, one at centre and one at scrumhalf; a slightly harrowing baptism in the defeat away to Sale at the outset of the 2005-06 campaign.
But it was away to Gloucester in last season’s quarter-finals that O’Leary’s career took off, as he readily concedes. “The game against Ulster, before that game, was a big game for me, and Declan and Tony McGahan just said, ‘Keep doing what you’re doing’, and luckily things went well for me then.”
He credits the improvement in his passing to Garryowen’s Scottish director of rugby Greg Oliver, and his Dolphin coach, David O’Mahony. “I had played with Con for a year on the wing and I was getting a bit pissed off, because I wanted to play scrumhalf, so I moved to Dolphin and Dave O’Mahony there was brilliant for me. And then in the last year or two Greg has continued on that work – he works with all the scrumhalves in Munster. It’s something I need to keep working on and improve, the same as all aspects of my game, defence, kicking, everything; not to get too hung up on it but I need to keep working on it.”
Whereas he’d been on the bench in the ’06 Heineken Cup final, last season he was a pivotal part in the triumph. “To play in it, in the Millennium Stadium and packed with Munster fans, was unbelievable, and against Toulouse as well. A brilliant day, and brilliant memories going back home with the trophy. It gives you a hunger to have more success and it gives you a hunger to play at a higher level.
“And that’s what I want to do, I want to get to as high a level as I can and play for Ireland and play against the best sides in the world, and see how good I am and see how I can handle myself.”
Son of Seánie is handling himself just fine so far.
