Playing for Ireland is an honour for the feted outhalf, but donning the red jersey is a privilege. Keith Dugganreports.
RONAN O'GARA is standing in a hotel foyer talking with Peter Jackson - the eminent English rugby writer, that is, rather than the hirsute film director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. More than most people, O'Gara has had to deal with the fantastic over the past few months but although he has taken most of it in his stride, he would probably feel that all reality had finally caved in if he found himself in a full scale conversation about Frodo and The Hobbit.
Instead, he talks about a more familiar fellowship. It is the Monday of European Cup final week and the leafy hills above Douglas are bathed in sunshine. O'Gara went through a few hours of the big match demons and nerves over last weekend but on this sunny lunchtime, he is in high good humour.
Still, the conversation turns sombre at the mention of Danny Cipriani, the England heir apparent to Johnny Wilkinson who broke his ankle in a horrifying incident while playing for Wasps at the weekend.
O'Gara shakes in head with the empathy that one professional rugby man has for another. Doubtless, flashes of the impudence and trickery Cipriani displayed at Twickenham last March danced across O'Gara's mind. That day marked The End, when England fairly murdered the last vestiges of Ireland's hopes of saving their Six Nations season, thus ending the Eddie O'Sullivan era.
It was regarded as the heralding of a new dawn for England. Now Cipriani, the putative architect of the English revival, faces the first major setback of his career at the tender age of 20 while O'Gara prepares for yet another commanding role with Munster in this evening's epic final against the French aristocrats Toulouse in Cardiff. The old adage never fails. There are no certainties in sport. Least of all in the relentlessly punishing arena of modern rugby union.
"Well, injuries are one thing," reflects O'Gara a little later, rapping his knuckles against the armrest of his wicker chair when we sit down in the garden at the Maryborough House Hotel.
"And touch wood that won't happen. But just the rollercoaster of being involved in any team, you don't know what is around the corner. So much happens so quickly in sport, as I have found out. I still feel I have so much left that I want to achieve. I mean, the next World Cup? 2011? I don't know. Where I am now, realistically, you have three of your best years left and that is it. It changes the way you think. It is all in the now. There is no next week."
It is easy to imagine Ronan O'Gara as one of rugby's obsessive men but plain impossible to regard him as a rugby veteran. A full decade of acting as bait for murderous number eights has done little to batter the angelic expression out of him and he still talks about rugby with remarkable freshness.
He orders a light salmon lunch - "no butter or anything", he requests - and sits back in the sunshine to relax after a morning session of speed drills. Almost two years to the day, a few days before Munster's 2006 Heineken Cup final, he sat in this same balmy garden and was brimming with optimistic talk about that match and with more vague hopes for Ireland's World Cup in France the following autumn.
As the Chinese proverb goes, O'Gara has lived some interesting times since, from the floodlit thrills of the Croke Park exhibition Ireland gave against England to the frightening experience of falling unconscious against Scotland and the outright nightmare of the world cup.
IN ADDITION TO playing a pivotal role for a team that simply couldn't ignite in France, O'Gara had to deal with poisonous stories about his personal life that included rumours of gambling debts and marital trouble.
It was hateful stuff, intrusive on O'Gara's family as well as on the player himself. And it was the undoubted low point of a week that indicated a lot about governing attitudes in Ireland, when the rugby team that had been lionised in the spring was pilloried and mocked in October.
You might expect O'Gara to reflect on those few weeks with a bitter edge and there is no sign of the trademark sunny grin when he talks about that time. However, it is not so much the turmoil of those few weeks in France he holds onto but the reaction when he took the field for his first match back for Munster against Edinburgh.
"It seems strange me saying this now, but I suppose I might not have been too sure of where I stood in the Munster supporters' hearts. I think all through my career, I kind of struggled with the whole thing of stopping and talking with people and I suppose people might have thought I was rude. But it wasn't that. I would be close with friends and team-mates but on the street, I just go about my business. Particularly so after the World Cup. I mean. There was no choice but to get on with things.
"But even before that, myself and Jess [Jessica, his wife] had always been private people. I always use Roy [Keane] as a model in that way - you never see Roy with a picture of his wife and kids. And he is fifty or one hundred times the sports person I am. Like, a few years ago, we were playing for Munster in Thomond in front of five hundred people. And it has grown from there but I was never really comfortable with the whole public thing. That day against Edinburgh, though, the reception I got was incredible. And it summed up to me that these people respect me and appreciate me. And it meant a lot to me."
On television, O'Gara can come across as such an unflappable and even arrogant presence that the millions watching those ominous World Cup games against France and Argentina must have been searching for evidence of a man on the verge of breakdown every time the cameras caught his face. There were moments when the strain seemed to show. But when he looks back on that time, he sounds convincing when he claims the rumours and sensationalism did not interfere with his performance in an Irish shirt.
"It didn't," he says intensely.
"That is the truth. The rumour started around here, around Cork, long before that. I had been hearing them and so had my team-mates within three months of us being married."
But it was surely no coincidence that they hit the newspapers on the eve of Ireland's World Cup campaign.
"I know," he sighs. "And in fairness to Eddie, we talked through whether I should release a statement and we took professional advice. And the feeling was that if you comment on something like that, you feed a story, you give it credibility."
Damned if you do and damned if you don't. Because his life revolves around playing outhalf, O'Gara is accustomed to knowing his own mind in the maelstrom of away arenas and intense, big-time matches. He was a big enough boy to weather the storm. Yet however painful the episode must have been for him, it was infinitely worse for his wife, his parents and those close to him.
"Absolutely," he says quietly, "absolutely."
In the weeks afterwards, the O'Garas literally escaped to New York, where it was easy to be anonymous. They had considered flying to South Africa for Trevor Halstead's wedding. O'Gara grins when he thinks about the genial Cape Town man, one of the ex-Munster men he will always stay in touch with.
"An incredibly nice fella. He's elusive, though! He disappears! Don't know why he retired because there's a lot of clubs that would pay big money for his body. Boy, he was strong."
In other circumstances, the O'Garas would have loved to have flown south for the celebrations but given the World Cup experience, the idea of a vast wedding banquet filled with current and former rugby stars in the nation that had just won Webb Ellis trophy, they sent apologies.
"It probably wouldn't have been the best place to be," he laughs now."
Returning to Munster was a relief. He was welcomed in the traditional manner, with merciless sledging. Just as new signing Doug Howlett was pounded for his bout of late night car-dancing in Cardiff, O'Gara was given the third degree about those gambling rumours. Alan Quinlan remembered the Tongan player Epi Taioni had been paid £10,000 to change his name by deed poll to Paddy Power for the duration of the World Cup. When O'Gara returned to training, Quinlan wasted no time in introducing him to everyone as "William Hill".
"Except he was telling everyone that my problem was that I would need a lot more than ten grand."
IT WAS the old Munster-as-family ethos. It may be clichéd now but that doesn't diminish the truth of it. O'Gara has travelled through professional rugby long enough to have learned the Munster kinship is precious, a fellowship that cannot be replicated in other squads. In a sense, O'Gara lives two sporting lives. He has his Munster days and his Irish career. He speaks of both with intense loyalty and with the peculiar affection that sportsmen can talk about their teams. Often, he compares and contrasts Ireland and Munster, the only two teams he has known.
He accepts the Irish form has inexplicably vanished and the World Cup camp was not a barrel of laughs but he insists it wasn't as straightforward as people believed. It felt as if they had built a huge bonfire, capable of causing a furnace only to discover the box of matches was damp.
"People who know their sport understand that. I know from playing France we were one or two passes away from breaking them. You could see in their body language and how they carried themselves that they were knackered. It takes that one breakthrough to put a different spin on things. But all of a sudden, I had a shocking tournament; all the players had a shocking tournament. We did underplay but it is not that simple. And it was miserable, yeah. It was very low and disappointing.
"Look, when you are winning you are going to have a happy camp. If not, you are faking it. Why should you be happy when you are playing like p**s? Then you are trying harder, you dig a bigger hole. It is a delicate balance to get right."
The last Six Nations felt weighted by the sense that change was imminent. He grins at the foolishness of the suggestion that he and O'Sullivan could be classed as friends but then falls serious.
"Over the years, like, we had friendly moments, for sure. And eventually Eddie will be remembered for what he is: a very good coach. We have spoken just once since he left but when we do meet again, there will be no awkwardness. I think that is what happens in all rugby teams now, except probably Munster, where people stay in touch long after they leave."
Munster: the eternal, unbreakable team. This final feels different. There is no surprise at being there again. But the butterflies are just as lively and the sense of privilege grows more profound. Spend an hour with O'Gara and you cannot but appreciate that sense of honour he feels when it comes to playing for this provincial team, this phenomenon. He doesn't know how many more seasons are left and he talks happily - vaguely - about Ireland under Declan Kidney and the Lions under Ian McGeehan. But hey, the best laid plans of mice and men and all that. O'Gara is certain of only one thing when it comes to rugby: there is only the now.
"In Munster, what you are continuously doing is trying to build up respect and you have to put that away for the day you can count on it. Hopefully, that will show on Saturday, that we have a fight for each other that - hopefully - other teams cannot match. And I am conscious of what I want to achieve with the time I have left. I have fierce drive left in me. I thought it might calm down a little. But it is actually getting worse."
"In Munster, what you are continuously doing is trying to build up respect and you have to put that away for the day you can count on it. Hopefully, that will show on Saturday that we have a fight for each other that — hopefully- other teams cannot match.
CHOKING INCIDENT 'A MYTH'
IN RETROSPECT, it might be regarded as a portentous incident. Ireland played Scotland for the Triple Crown in 2007 and far from romping home in exuberant fashion, the Irish scraped a cagey 19-18 win. But the closing moments of that match are remembered for the sight or O'Gara, who scored all of Ireland's points that afternoon, lying supine on the ground near a ruck as the full-time whistle went.
John Hayes rolled the number 10 into the recovery position and when the referee blew the final whistle, concern was the abiding emotion. In the confusion afterwards, it was reported O'Gara had been choked by one of the Scottish forwards, Nathan Hynes.
"That's a myth, you know. It didn't happen," O'Gara says now. " I did lose consciousness but not as a result of choking. That is an awful allegation to put against any player. I apologised to Nathan Hynes because I didn't know what happened. That was a story that came out of the dressingroom straightaway.
"Because the match ended and the boys went to press and I think one or two of the lads felt I had been choked. I got badly winded and I was caught in a terrible position with Hayes on one side of me and some other . . . big ape on the other side of me and I couldn't move. I was trying to hit them, hit them because I was gradually losing air and it is a nasty feeling. But then sure, once you are out you don't know where you are."
It ended happily enough, with O'Gara walking off unaided and grinning sheepishly as his team-mates shook his hand.
"Oh God, yeah. It was down to John Hayes' quick thinking. He checked to see if I had swallowed my tongue and rolled me on to my side. I took a runner off nine, a hard ball and I tried to shoulder charge a forward and I got a good smack off him and just after that, I got caught and that was it."
