IRELAND v USA:Although a lynchpin of Ireland's Golden Generation, Gordon D'Arcy tells GERRY THORNLEYhe has some unfinished business to attend to at the World Cup
WORLD CUPS have provided a curious case history for Gordon D’Arcy. As a wide-eyed and fairly innocent 19-year-old, he made his Test debut for 20 minutes in the 1999 tournament, wasn’t picked for 2003 in Australia and then suffered in France four years ago. Thus, like many of the so-called Golden Generation, he’s drinking at the last chance saloon.
This appears only to have emboldened him though. He’s been wearing a smile to training every day and, though that would not be unusual for one of the squad’s more thoughtful souls, others confirm he is noticeably less worrisome than usual about any niggles. He seems, to coin a phrase, to be up for it.
D’Arcy is not the type to reflect on his career, but sitting in the courtyard of the team’s hotel on the outskirts of New Plymouth yesterday, and despite the distraction of Cian Healy in the jacuzzi, he had no problem doing so.
Looking back on his innocence of youth days in 1999, he concedes “if I knew then what I know now, or even half of what I know now, it would have been a much different experience for me.”
But rugby and D’Arcy were both in a different place then, each taking relatively formative steps into professionalism. “That was probably not the best thing for a guy of my make-up,” he says.
“Conor O’Shea took me under his wing for the whole thing and starting to get to grips with little bits and pieces, like kicking practice. I was like: ‘um, what do you mean kicking practice?’ I know it sounds alien now, but this was 12 years ago.”
Though his was largely a watching brief, he enjoyed it immensely, especially coming on against Romania in the 60th minute on a night when Alan Quinlan and Angus McKeen also won their first caps. “I remember getting just one good run up the middle of the pitch and if I was about a stone lighter I might have been able to finish it off,” he says with a smile. A cherished memory is of O’Shea, the man he replaced, giving him his jersey.
Sitting in the stands for the quarter-final play-off defeat in Lens, he says, prompted his “first real appreciation of how s*** it is to lose. Even though I wasn’t playing I remember being absolutely devastated and having that really hollow feeling inside. That real feeling of ‘what just happened here?’ But that’s a good thing too, we are competitors.”
In the build-up to the 2003 tournament he could see the writing on the wall from the day Ireland played in Tonga the previous June. When an unwell Girvan Dempsey was ruled out on the morning of the game, Mark McHugh was picked in his stead, not D’Arcy.
The following week in Samoa, D’Arcy went to Eddie O’Sullivan in Adie Gray’s Hotel to ask him the lie of the land. O’Sullivan gave it to him, with both barrels. “I’ve had a couple of fairly frank conversations with coaches and that’s probably up there in the top two or three, in terms of him telling me exactly what he thought of me. Not as a person, but just as a rugby player.
“I kind of sat there with my chin on the ground and I went away from that absolutely devastated.”
Nor does he hold any grudges for O’Sullivan’s candidness. “One hundred per cent on the mark,” he concedes. “That’s one thing I’ve always admired about him, you can always take his honesty and he was, painfully so. But I’ve dealt with so many coaches at this stage that I’d take that any day of the week.”
The general gist of O’Sullivan’s critique was that D’Arcy needed to be more consistent. It wasn’t what he wanted to hear, but he knew it was true.
Hence, come the fateful day of his exclusion from the 30-man squad, though he initially baulked at answering before returning O’Sullivan’s call, he wasn’t that devastated for a while. “But then I rang my mum and that’s when it all came crashing out. Whatever it is about Irish mothers and their sons, that inexplicable link, I started bawling down the phone.”
Gary Ella gave him a three-day break from Leinster training. Then, with O’Sullivan’s words still ringing in his ears, came a new-found freedom of expression, which Ella encouraged. And on foot of Ella picking D’Arcy at outside centre for a revenge win away to Sale in the absence of Brian O’Driscoll, O’Sullivan – in one of his best calls ever – followed suit two games later at the start of the 2004 Six Nations.
Nor has O’Sullivan ever given him better words of advice than before that first game in Paris. “Some players go there and it’s the end of their careers, and for some people it makes their careers. He said ‘you’ve got to decide which one is yours’.”
An innately gifted runner, D’Arcy’s career finally took off. That said, the 2007 World Cup was one long downer. “What kills me about ’07 is the form we had from the Six Nations. We were the form team from the northern hemisphere and it just abandoned us.”
To this day, D’Arcy says he still can’t fathom why. On reflection he’d like to have continued playing on the summer tour to Argentina, but maintains: “Everybody has their ideas, but they’re only ideas. Nobody can give you a recipe for what went wrong.”
Now, like O’Driscoll and others, at 31 there’s not much chance of another one. “Not a sniff,” he stresses.
A delayed ankle operation, the recuperation and the very real feeling that his best rugby was tantalisingly within reach after two games, was compounded by the very real fright of a grade one tear to a calf on the morning of departure. “But I feel as if I’m at the World Cup now, and it feels like this is something special again.
“For me it’s going to be all about the games. I just really want to win matches. You win your first match, the next week becomes that little bit more enjoyable and the momentum builds.
“I haven’t been looking forward to a game this much in a long time. I’ve been on Lions and Baa-Baas tours, but 1999 passed me by, 2007 was a complete mess up for whatever reasons, and I want to leave something behind. I don’t want to leave that (World Cup) chapter kind of blank. Not for myself, but for Ireland. There is a ‘what if?’ around this particular generation of Irish rugby players.
“ I do think that there is a place in history for this team. The only people who can do it are us and the people who can get in our way, I genuinely think, are ourselves.
“Let’s not be Irish, in a sense, and get in our own way. Let’s pick each other up and all be going in the same direction and just have that self-belief, but that comes from games.”
The time for talking has almost stopped. He recalls how Nike expanded their empire on Michael Jordan’s phrase; how he once spent two-and-a-half hours with the sports psychologist Enda McNulty “and at the end of it we just had three words.”
Just do it.
