The centre caught the rugby bug when Ulster won the European Cup in 1999 – now he can play a part in inspiring the
next generation, writes GERRY THORNLEY

THIS COULD be quite a weekend for a couple of old schoolmates from Sullivan High School. Ideally, Darren Cave would like his Ulster team to topple Munster at Thomond Park tomorrow and then make it back to Belfast in time to see Rory McIlroy tee off a winning final round in the Masters. The stuff of boyhood dreams alright.

“That would be absolutely brilliant,” is about as far as Cave is prepared to go, for fear of tempting fate. They both embarked upon their weekend assignments as second favourites, but it’s worth recalling that on the same weekend last year both McIlroy and Ulster, away to Northampton, played themselves into winning positions.

Cave and McIlroy grew up in Holywood and attended Sullivan High School, where Cave was a couple of years ahead of his friend. Both of them also played at Holywood Golf Club as well. “Michael Bannon is my swing coach as well but for some reason he doesn’t publicly acknowledge me,” says Cave, laughing. “He attaches himself to Rory for some reason.”

Whatever about his rugby, Cave doesn’t take his golf too seriously. “I play off 14, but it’s not for me. It’s not my game. I have to say I really enjoy it. I love watching it and I love playing.” Close your eyes and you could almost imagine it is McIlroy. Polite and good-humoured, Cave has the same smiling, sunny disposition.

Time was when McIlroy might turn up at Newforge or Ravenhill after Ulster’s training session and join in with the kickers for a laugh. “He hits the golf ball a wee bit nicer,” quips Cave diplomatically. But big Ulster fan though McIlroy is, since his career went stratospheric and he joined the US tour, he hasn’t had the time to take in games or sessions.

Huge fan of the Masters though he is, Cave doesn’t want to get too caught up in the weekend’s golf, but as competition rules demand that the away side are in situ 24 hours before kick-off, it will provide him and his team-mates with a welcome distraction too.

Along with his father Brian, mother Ruth and older brother Stuart, Cave remains a member at Holywood GC, but rugby has always been his first love, ever since his dad was a minis coach at Holywood RFC. Around four or five years of age, he can recall “running in the wrong direction and all of that; not having a clue what was going on.”

After Saturday mornings addicted to Super Rugby on television and minis rugby, his dream of playing for Ulster hardened when they won the 1999 European Cup. He was 12, in his first year at Sullivan and the Cave family were amongst a coach load from Holywood – “The whole of the province was down there.”

At such an impressionable age, needless to say Ulster’s win left an indelible mark on him. “You watch that and you think, flip, and I think Ireland, and in particular Northern Ireland, is a country where if someone or something does well people get right in behind. It happened with our football team a few years ago when they beat England and suddenly everyone is a big football fan, the golf now and the rugby; the place is like that. I remember the next year it was nearly impossible to get season tickets. I was thinking, ‘This is brilliant. Imagine doing something like that myself?’”

Cave played at inside centre throughout his underage years but on joining Belfast Harlequins his then coach, Andy Ward, converted him to an outside centre. Along with David Pollack, Seán O’Brien, Felix Jones and others, Cave was part of Ireland’s Under-20 Grand Slam team in 2007.

That summer, Eddie O’Sullivan having rested his 15 frontliners for the tour to Argentina, to his own astonishment Cave made Ireland’s Churchill Cup squad.

“I didn’t know why I was there. I played one game for Ulster. I was going, ‘What am I doing?’ And I remember playing against the Maoris and we got a bit of a hiding. But myself and Keith (Earls) got a couple of tries each (in the tournament) and it was an unbelievable experience.”

Cave thought, briefly, that he had hit “the big time” but describes the next season, in which he played for Ulster just twice and the coaching reins went from Mark McCall to Steve Williams to Matt Williams as “a bit of a mess for me and for the club.”

But the following season he made 21 starts and scored seven tries, prompting Williams to declare him O’Driscoll’s heir apparent. “It is strange the way he has dominated that position for so long that everyone has to be the next Brian O’Driscoll,” says Cave. “If we’re all honest about it the next Brian O’Driscoll is probably not to going to come for another 30 or 50 years. So it doesn’t bother me at all. I think if you’re in the same sentence as him I would take it as a nice compliment but nothing more and nothing less.”

All that being said, Cave admits to being frustrated with an international career which has just yielded two caps on the tour to North America in 2009. “There’s no hiding the fact that those caps were different from playing on a full-strength Ireland team but at the same time they were caps and they were something that I had definitely hoped to kick on from. Unfortunately, three years later, I haven’t but I haven’t given up hope yet.”

And why should he? This season Cave has probably played his best rugby. Defensively, he’s a good reader of the game and a highly effective tackler, while offensively he has an ability to straighten the line and sniff out a gap or the try-line, with an impressive strike rate of five tries in 17 games.

He attributes the improvement to the way Neil Doak has sharpened Ulster’s attacking game – along with their 16 in six Heineken Cup games, Ulster’s haul of 49 tries in 19 games is easily the highest in the Pro 12 and is 11 more than Leinster.

“As a 13 it’s brilliant whereas a couple of years ago we weren’t scoring 49 tries a year. We were scrapping out of the bottom of the league and it was tough. Now there is quality all over the field. You get the ball in space. It’s the way I want to play rugby and ultimately it makes me look good. It sort of facilitates my play but I think that Leinster and Munster have had that advantage for the past couple of years. Like I think back to that game against Bath and I remember my dad saying he probably could have scored if he was playing for Leinster in that back line because the performance was just surreal.”

At the turn of the year, with a posse of would be young 13s queuing up to fill the void left by Brian O’Driscoll’s injury, Cave was the most natural fit, whereupon he was cruelly sidelined with a knee injury for six weeks on the eve of the Six Nations squad being picked. Admittedly, once Earls proved his fitness in January, it was always likely that Declan Kidney would go with Earls.

Then Cave had to watch Earls put together four highly-impressive performances in the number 13 jersey and now, with O’Driscoll back, Cave looks even further down the pecking order. Not that he makes tomorrow’s head-to-head with Earls exactly like the Gunfight at the OK Corral.

“As a bloke I like him (Earls) a lot. I wouldn’t speak to him that much but he’s a lovely fella and I think he’s a cracking player. There is a lot of talk about where he plays in the back, and obviously I would like to see him not pursue his career as a 13 but I think I’m a small bit biased,” he quips.

“But he’s so talented, particularly his footwork and his speed, that I think you could put him anywhere in the backs and he’d be brilliant. Every time he gets the ball in any form of space he’s going to cause teams problems so it doesn’t really matter what number is on his back.”

Like Ferris, Cave missed last season’s quarter-final away to Northampton, which merely heightens his sense of anticipation for tomorrow’s almighty showdown. “They’re the favourites. There’s no hiding that,’ he says, but then leans forward slightly and looks you in the eye. “But if the favourites always won in rugby union then it wouldn’t be the game that we all love.”