RUGBY SIX NATIONS CHAMPIONSHIP: GERRY THORNLEYtalks to Ireland's loose-head prop who lines out for his 47th game in a row in tonight's game against England at Croke Park

HE CAN’T really believe it’s 10 years now. That debut against Scotland in 2000 seems like yesterday. For the last decade he’s been a veritable rock. Invaluable and indispensable. The Bull. He can’t even remember where that started or who christened him. It’s all gone by in a blur, and even to this day it’s almost as if he still can’t quite believe it.

This weekend he takes to the pitch for his 47th game in a row, drawing level with Malcolm O’Kelly as Ireland’s most capped player with 92 caps, and he’s also in line to draw level with Anthony Foley as the joint record holder for most appearances in the Heineken Cup in the quarter-final against the Ospreys.

“I wouldn’t have a clue about anything like that. It never dawned on me,” he says, with a typical lack of self importance. “Even the Munster one I wouldn’t know. It’s over 80 anyway.”

While he doesn’t take much meaning from these landmarks, they’re a remarkable testimony to his durability, consistency, reliability and professionalism.

“Would I ever have thought it? I can’t even stress how much I would never have imagined it. Like, when I started off first there wasn’t even professionalism. I didn’t even know enough about it that it might go professional the year after. You know the way some people might have known ‘something’s going to happen here – this is going to go pro’. Nothing could have been further from my mind. And then this was going to happen to me after that? No. Never.”

Hurling and football with Doon CBS and then with Cappamore were the only sports he played until he was 19. “Curiosity,” took him to rugby one day, spawned in particular by the 1991 World Cup. “That was when I really got an interest in it. Before that I’d watched the Five Nations on television but I didn’t ever really take that big an interest. But I always remember the Ireland-Australia match. I remember watching that game. I’d just turned 18 and then a year after I was wondering would I go and I eventually did.”

The time was September, 1992, and his first game with Bruff was in the backrow in a scoreless draw against Newcastlewest. Legend has it that he was applauded off the pitch, although the way he recalls it, “It was only some of the boys” and it happened at the ensuing Tuesday evening training session.

As Bruff didn’t have an under-20 side at the time (though they’ve since reached an All-Ireland under-20 final) Willie Conway, now the Bruff RFC president, suggested that Hayes go up to Shannon. Bruff have since earned senior status in a remarkable climb and Hayes has rejoined them, with a notion of maybe lining out for their firsts in an AIL game one day.

Shannon did most to nurture Hayes’ own remarkable climb, not to mention backboning Munster, and in turn Ireland, as well as developing the winning culture which seeped through to province and country. At times they even made up half the Munster and Irish packs.

Particular mention, too, in the Hayes story, has to be reserved for Niall O’Donovan. “Niallo was coaching the seniors when I started there with the under-20s and there wasn’t even a shout of getting on the senior team back in 1993.

“It was still only my first year. One day they were short of numbers for training, for a scrummaging session. I remember him [O’Donovan] asking me to go in and I said ‘Jaysus no’ because Gaillimh was playing at the time and he’d just been picked on the 1993 Lions. Just training with him in the same environment was daunting. He [O’Donovan] worked with me for years after that. Some of the players went from Shannon to Munster to Ireland and it was no coincidence that he made the same steps as well.”

You ask Hayes what it is he admired about his former mentor-cum-coach. “The honesty and the straight talking. If a session went wrong with the forwards, he’d say it to you straight out. He said it to me on occasion if I didn’t play well or what I needed to work on. There was no bullshit. It was straight up.”

Following the same route of course, if a little more circuitously, has been Declan Kidney, whose first Munster session in July 1997 with O’Donovan was also Hayes’. “He just has a way with fellas. He knows how to get the best out of people, that’s really what he does. He gets you to do it yourself.”

There have been other key influences along the way, such as Munster scrum coach Paul McCarthy, and key moves along the way, such as a year playing with Marist in New Zealand and being converted gradually from a secondrow to a prop at 22 by Shannon.

Hayes admits it wouldn’t be stretching things to say he went out to New Zealand a boy (15½st) and came back a man (18st). “I’d never been away from home and even something like that, going away to New Zealand and living on your own with no real support, toughens you up. The club were great but I was an Irishman living in New Zealand on my own. To succeed you have to get involved and get on with it.”

As for the rugby, well, as he recounts with a wry smile, “there were no touchjudges putting out flags. But in saying that I didn’t have one what you’d call cheap shot. You’d get some shoeings, you’d get punches, but it was all give and take. That’s the way they played it. You’d play a country team out in the sticks in Southland. They were hardy boys and like I said there were no touchjudges or citing commissioners or anything like that. If there were boots flying that was it. That was the way they played it, but I enjoyed every minute of it.”

Over the years, there’s been plenty of talkative opponents, but the gentle giant scarcely takes any heed and is never inclined to respond himself. The many criticisms, primarily of his scrummaging, have largely died away now, in recognition of his form in latter years.

“Some of it [was] deserved though I’d say. I’d be the first person to admit there were days I didn’t do myself justice, days when I could have done better for myself.”

After two years on the Shannon firsts and one year with Munster, he was fast-tracked into the 1998 tour to South Africa by Warren Gatland. Of all the awe-struck days in his career, turning up for training in Lansdowne Road amongst that 36-man squad was the most daunting. “I’d never been anywhere near that place or even knew half the fellas. I looked around and thought ‘is this real?’”

Ever since his debut against Scotland in February 2000, Gatland, Eddie O’Sullivan and Declan Kidney have made him one of the first names on the team sheet. That he has never missed a championship match through injury has prompted admiring disbelief, although Hayes was obliged to play through back pain in the second half of the 2003-2004 season.

Rest, or as he puts it, game management, is critical for Hayes; last weekend being a case in point. You’d have thought he’d have required a spatula to peel him off his couch, but back on the family farm in Bruff he couldn’t resist some work.

There were odds of 1 to 10 about him retiring after the last World Cup, but he says: “That was never an option, not even for a second. I never gave it any kind of consideration. There’s two sides to it, the physical side to keep going and the mental side, and I’m enjoying it.”

Like all tight-heads, much of what he does best and enjoys the most, he doesn’t actually see, such as Peter Stringer nipping in on the blind side for the famous try against Biarritz in the 2006 Heineken Cup final, or the yardage gained by Jamie Heaslip off the base against France. A human forklift, his work at lineout time for Munster and Ireland has been priceless, and he’s a brick wall defensively as an aptly named Pillar One. “I’m not, obviously a major carrier but you always do love getting a bit of ball, but only every so often and when it’s right.”

Winning though is the best. “It makes the journey home so much shorter, it makes the knocks hurt less. When you wake up the day after a win there isn’t the same soreness. You feel like you can go again.”

While there’ve been a couple of Heineken Cups, there’s still a sense of unfinished business with Ireland, that they haven’t quite achieved what they should have done. “We’ve won three Triple Crowns, which is great, but we’d also like to win a championship. That’s definitely something that keeps driving fellas on.”

The World Cup may have lured him into the game but he has long since been consumed by the uniqueness of the championship, and everything about a Six Nations weekend.

“These are the ones you play for,” he says of today’s game. England in the Six Nations; there’s something about it.”

FACTFILE

Full name:John James Hayes

Nickname: The Bull (and Pillar One)

DOB:November 2nd, 1973

Born: Cappamore, Co Limerick

School attended: Doon CBS

Height: 6ft 4in (1.93m)

Weight:19st 9lb (125kg)

Club: Munster, Bruff

First professional appearance: February 19th, 2000, against Scotland

Career highlights: 1998 tour to South Africa; helping Munster to Heineken Cup glory, 2006 and 2008; Ireland's Triple Crown.