More than 20 years ago, on a short tour of New Zealand, Ronan O’Gara’s goal-kicking failed. In two Test matches he landed one penalty from eight attempts. The second Test was so one-sided it made no material difference to the outcome, but in Dunedin Ireland had the All-Blacks by the throat and the game was decided only by a late try. New Zealand won by nine points; O’Gara had missed three penalties. In the second Test he failed to score. In his mind, a fuse had blown somewhere.
He said years later that the management tried to build him back up for the second Test, “but in those situations you must repair yourself. I don’t think I did.” Afterwards he went on holiday to Crete with his wife Jess, but he couldn’t get the tour out of his head, so he rang Keith Wood, the Ireland captain, and thrashed it out with him. “He told me I had to confront it. If I tried to forget it, or sweep it under the carpet, the demons would come back.”
In the months that followed O’Gara engaged seriously with a sports psychologist for the first time, and learned the ropes of visualisation, a technique that would underpin his goal kicking for the rest of his career. The essential point, though, was that finding a solution needed to be his responsibility.
In team sports the guiding dynamic is that everyone carries and everyone is carried. In rugby, though, there is an irreducible loneliness about playing outhalf. Their capacity to think and execute under screeching pressure is the hinge on which their teams swing. Coping with that is rugby’s most complex problem. In that space failure is brutal and consequential.
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It is 10 years, this week, since O’Gara played his last game. In that time, a succession of players have worn the red number 10 for Munster, with varying degrees of comfort. Nobody has seized the jersey and turned it into a prosperous career, or a silver screen for their talent.
When Joey Carbery was rerouted from Leinster during the last World Cup cycle it seemed that Munster, at last, had a player with the tools and the temperament to lead the team, as number 10s must. He already had a dozen caps for Ireland and was Johnny Sexton’s undisputed understudy. Injuries haunted him at first, and for a long time; this season, though, that is no longer a mitigating factor.
Over the last fortnight Munster’s entry to the URC play-offs, and their qualification for next season’s Champions Cup, revolved around two games in South Africa. For both Carbery was omitted from the match day 23. Three months after Carbery had been relegated to Ireland’s fourth choice outhalf, he was suddenly number three in Munster.
When Carbery was omitted from Ireland’s squad for the Six Nations in January, O’Gara wrote about it with typical clarity in his Irish Examiner column.
“The first thing Carbery finds is a mirror,” he wrote. “Talk to it and listen to the reply. Option A is the Ireland coach’s decision destroys you mentally or Option B, you make a plan to counterattack, you stick to it, and you reflect on how unique the life of a rugby 10 is. When you have your highs, they are higher than anyone else’s; your lows are lower than anyone else’s.”
O’Gara wasn’t bombproof either. Nobody is. We worked together for the guts of a year on his first book, and in civilian life he was warm and generous and big-hearted and terrific company. But he had insecurities too, and vulnerabilities, just like the rest of us. He was inclined to be bothered by what other people thought and said, when mostly he just needed to ignore it.
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Before really big matches he suffered desperately with nerves, no matter how many times he had succeeded in the past. In the arena, though, he was different. It wasn’t just his skill set, it was his capacity to cope: with the hits, with the pivotal moments, with the big kicks, with his doubts.
On his coaching podcast earlier this year Mike Quirke interviewed O’Gara for a fascinating piece in which they spoke at length about confidence. O’Gara’s view was that it cannot be left to circumstance: confidence must be something that the athlete controls.
“There’s no such thing as a confidence player,” O’Gara said. “It really frustrates me having to deal with that because that language should never come into anyone’s mind set, especially an experienced player. There’s no such thing as a confidence player. In other words, ‘His fundamentals aren’t strong enough,’ – that’s another way of saying that for me. Or ‘When the sun is shining, he could be good.’ You’re depending on coulds, buts and ifs.”
Carbery is in a tough place now. How much confidence does he have left? How much control does he have over it?
When Munster bombed out in the Champions Cup last month much was made about their deficiencies in the front row, but the biggest, recurring issue for Munster over the last 10 years has been outhalf. Ian Keatley stayed for six seasons after O’Gara finished without ever quite sustaining the level that Munster needed from their 10.
JJ Hanrahan had the creativity and the confidence, but not the kicking game. The excitement about Johnny Holland as a young player was nearly as great as the excitement around Jack Crowley now, but injury stopped him dead in his tracks. The New Zealander Tyler Bleyendaal was slaughtered by injuries too, and in four of his five seasons his appearances at outhalf were counted in single figures.
Bleyendaal suffered a serious neck injury after he signed for Munster, but before he arrived in Limerick. It meant, among other things, that his first season was nearly a write-off. The late Anthony Foley was the Munster coach and he spoke in pastoral terms about the club’s responsibility to Bleyendaal.
“We as a club need to look after the player,” Foley said. “It’s not a piece of meat we’re dealing with. It’s a human being, so there’s a human side to this that we need to manage, and that is what Munster is about, it’s about people.”
Munster’s attack coach Mike Prendergast spoke sensitively about Carbery last week, and it was clear from his remarks that the player will be supported. But there is a limit to how much coaches can do. They need him to recover. As O’Gara discovered many years ago, the only viable solutions must come from Carbery.
