RACING/Six Nations' Interview: "Every outhalf wants the ball in a particular way and you really haveto hit the pass as precisely as you can so that for the kicker it is all one movement from hand to foot." Keith Duggan talks to Ireland scrumhalf Peter Stringer who has been handed the role of patrolling behind Ireland's front line.
For we onlookers, it is terrifying. Take this typical Six Nations scenario. On your left stands Peter Alexander Stringer, Ireland scrumhalf, sleeves rolled, choirboy face furrowed with concentration, 5ft 7in and weighing in at 11st - provided he has eaten a good dinner. To your right, for instance, Imanol Harinordoquy, France's number eight, 6ft 3in and 16st of pure muscle.
Imanol has the ball in his hand and is travelling at merciless speed towards the very spot where PA Stringer stands resolute. It is perfectly clear that the Frenchman has no intention of slowing on Stringer's account and is not inclined to go around him. It is perfectly clear that, in seconds, the two will meet and that momentum and physical mass and gravity will determine one logical and possibly gruesome outcome.
"Well, I was always taught that if you take them by the ankles, they are going to hit the ground, no matter how big they come."
One of the earliest life lessons that Peter Stringer learned was that he would not have to travel far before he met someone bigger than him. This was especially true on the rugby field. Throwing himself with abandon into the paths of human juggernauts and emerging unscathed was a trick the Cork boy learned early and repeated often.
It was partly an exercise in self-knowledge, partly a practical way to slow down the opposition.
He is celebrated for it now. Ireland's Little Big Man. A spiky headed, sweet-faced, honest toiler. In the many theses on the key to the success of modern Irish rugby, Stringer is always overshadowed by the imperious greatness of Brian O'Driscoll, by the range of skills that Geordan Murphy possesses or by the scale and grace of big Mal O'Kelly. In the great debate about who to play at number 10, the red-faced urchin, crouched like a midwife at the base of the scrum, is forgotten. There is very little talk about Peter Stringer. And yet he is always there.
A moment stands out from the France game. It is late in the afternoon, the luminous jackets of the Garda column bracket the field. The visitors are throwing the ball around, desperate and dangerous. Brian O'Driscoll, alive to the dangers of an overlap, commits to a tackle and hits with his usual ferocity, but the ball is transferred even as the Irish man pulverises the blue shirt.
A sudden gurgle of alarm wells and dies across the ground. France have space and a long kick forward and it is a straight, old-fashioned sprint to the hills. Late and improvised bursts for glory in rugby games are simply a means of expression to the French. When this Six Nations is in repose, that sequence might be identified as a season-on-the-line kind of moment. And it was Stringer who led the cavalry.
"I just remember thinking 'this is it, I'm going to have to run as hard as I can', and I was so knackered. My legs were about to crank up. Afterwards Denis (Hickie) told me that he was in support but I had no clue what was behind me and I couldn't hear a thing.
"Fortunately, the ball was coming to the end of its movement so it wasn't bobbing around too badly and I was able to slide onto it, and then I think Quinny (Alan Quinlan) picked up and we were able to clear our lines. But yeah, I had that feeling that it was a moment we didn't want to mess up."
Relieved as the rest of the nation to see the scrumhalf cradle the ball, Eddie O'Sullivan would not have been surprised. The Irish coach must see a little of himself in Stringer: brave and cautious and meticulous. The role assigned to the scrumhalf this year is designed to place him in that position, in the lonely and vulnerable spots of Irish territory just behind the front line.
"So normally, if a guy breaks the first line of our defence, I'm there for sort of a sidelong tackle, a covering tackle or to just generally clean up."
The disadvantage is that he does not experience the joy of demolishing some sky-scraping lineout jumper as regularly as he used to.
"But I suppose in a way it is easier for me, taking someone down from the side as opposed to trying to knock him backwards."
Peter Stringer can't fully recall when rugby first got under his skin. It may have been when his father, John, began throwing a Dolphin RFC ball around with him in the back garden when he was about six. A big brown leather heavy thing that he handled as if it were a medicine ball.
Or maybe it was when Ronan O'Gara's father began coaching them for Cork Con's under-8s. Already, he was a bossy little scrum general.
"Yah know yourself how it works: big fella - prop, smallest fella - scrumhalf."
The game consumed him. After a distinguished apprenticeship at Presentation Cork, where he and O'Gara fine-tuned their famous double-act, he went on to UCC to study Science. There, he ended up spending Easter holidays alone locked in the stuffy laboratories to catch up on practical classes he missed trying to chase down a spot on the Munster team. White-coated and intense, a reluctant professor wondering which way to turn.
"Then, I only had a kind of small semi-contact with Munster and it was tough. The lecturers were telling me that I couldn't miss all the time I was, but I knew in my heart that the rugby wasn't going to suffer. I used to meet with Declan Kidney and we would talk, just about where I was going with my life. Like, I never doubted myself, but you don't know what is going to happen. Having someone like Declan assure me I could make it was great to hear at that time."
Since the great purges of 2000, when Stringer was one of five new faces brought into face Scotland after an annihilation in Twickenham, he has been transferring the promise and cleverness that made him Kidney's first choice for Munster to the international arena. He shivers sometimes when he thinks back to that horrible, hollowing defeat in England, when he sat on the bench the week before his international birth. Wearing the gear and close enough to hear the crisp English accents barking orders, flattening the green landscape ahead of them.
"But not really part of it. It was just the weirdest feeling, sitting there and wondering what difference anyone could make if they were sent in."
Since then, he has amassed 31 caps, a snappy and brave operator who specialises in being there at crucial points of every game with a butter-wouldn't melt countenance which seems to madden the clumsier, bigger mortals he teases around the lawless fringes of the scrum. The Italians appear to reserve a particular irritation for him. Two seasons ago, he bothered the colossal frame of Alessandro Troncon and the big Italian turned as if to swat a fly.
"I never saw it coming," admits Stringer, who was left with a black eye. "I don't think he even looked. In fairness, I gave his jersey a tug and he just reacted. He apologised to me afterwards. It was fairly brief, because we couldn't communicate. Then the next year I got another wallop and afterwards people were saying, come on, you must have done something. But if I could honestly remember anything I did to get a clip, I'd say it. But ah, that comes with the territory and you just get on with it."
This season, his old alliance with O'Gara has been sundered by circumstance but Stringer hasn't blinked. It must feel strange, moving to the brink of sporting history without his old friend, but this is a professional game and in David Humphreys he is partnering the ultimate professional.
Still, it took time. He knew O'Gara's every quirk and grimace, knew where he wanted the ball by instinct, and he wanted the same co-ordinates in order to supply quality ball for David.
"We spent time passing after training had finished. Every outhalf wants the ball in a particular way and you really have to hit the pass as precisely as you can so that for the kicker it is all one movement from hand to foot. Any adjustment means a delay."
Their toughest hour was against the French, when Stringer would zing passes to the Ulsterman only to see the French arrive as fast as the ball.
"It was weird. Like, Betson was landing on top of David before he hardly had a chance to pass. But because the French charge as a line, it is really hard to see if they are offside. We spoke about it, and later David stood deeper in the pocket to get a bit more time. But definitely, it was a tough afternoon for us."
Today brings its own pressures. The last time Stringer was in the Millennium Stadium was the May afternoon when Leicester beat Munster in the European Cup final. The roof was closed and the sensation was of being in an air-locked cavern.
"You literally had to yell in someone's ear to make yourself heard. I remember looking around before hand and I just couldn't imagine a rugby game taking place in that atmosphere."
His abiding recollection is of waiting for O'Gara to take a kick and feeling these drips of perspiration falling to the field from the metal girders high above.
"I hope there is fresh air for this game," he says simply.
Fresh air. Peter Stringer has been generating it all his life. As if anything but that could circulate around the small man whose shadow may well prove immeasurable.
