IRELAND V AUSTRALIA: As he prepares to lead his home team into Croke Park tomorrow, Rocky Elsom talks to Gerry Thornleyabout his time with Leinster, how he feels about the lads now and his decision to go home
ROCKY ELSOM has enjoyed being back in the relative intimacy of Dublin, which he always liked, after sprawling, time-consuming London. He cites the example of going to meet the referee, Bryce Lawrence, the day before last Saturday’s Twickenham Test “in some castle” where Lawrence was staying, and spending an hour in traffic getting back to the team hotel. “It really chews up your afternoon.”
On Monday he went to a nearby cafe with Emmet Byrne and Dan Ryan, and bumped into Brian O’Driscoll, Shane Horgan, Paul O’Donohoe, Chris Warner and others from the Leinster rugby community. Just like old times.
“I went with a bunch of guys I knew and then people rolled in. I just laughed a lot when I was here. Sometimes at people, sometimes with people, but it reminded me a lot of being here because it was like that all the time. Or if you saw someone out at night, and you said ‘hello’ to them or whatever, there’s a fair chance you’re going to see them again.”
On Wednesday night he’d been double booked, obliged to help launch an Australian website in town and thus having to skip a dinner with Michael Cheika, so we re-arranged our interview for breakfast time in the foyer of the Burlington Hotel the next morning.
After that, he was on to the Children’s Hospital in Crumlin. He had helped launch the annual triathlon in Farran Wood in Cork in September, which had been organised by Musgraves Cash and Carry, and would be there on Thursday morning for the formal handing over of a cheque for €250,000.
He begins with a yawn but is soon into his laconic and thoughtful stride, and seems to visibly light up when recounting his eight months with Leinster.
Now a blur of rampaging Rocky runs, big hits and man of the match awards, he reckons it went by all the quicker because he played so much – 21 of 24 games, (and only replaced once). Leinster had been knocking on that Euro door for 14 years before he came along, picked up a winner’s medal and breezed off home again. “Yeah, it worked out pretty well,” he laughs.
He recounts the lucky breaks Leinster had along the way, such as Castres beating Wasps and Leinster clinging on to that 6-5 quarter-final win in Harlequins. His neighbours in Raglan Road had regularly reminded him how important the Heineken Cup was, and prior to the quarter-finals a mate repeatedly warned him that a Leinster-Munster semi-final at Croke Park would be the biggest game in history.
He attributes the subsequent turnaround to a change of emphasis from Cheika and Alan Gaffney.
“Whatever we were doing just didn’t work so we simplified things, and I thought because of the detail in it, it was a reasonably gutsy move. Cheika and Riff read the situation really well. It was simpler, not to say a simpleton could have come up with it, but I thought that was a good thing.”
What he calls “launch plays” such as Gordon D’Arcy’s try suddenly started coming off – “which is very rare when that happens” – and they had also been written off by the media.
“That helped a lot, because if no-one expects you to win you’re less anxious about making mistakes. I think if you look at the Irish side that won the Grand Slam, if everyone had written them off and they really felt like the underdogs, they would have played a helluva lot better. I felt they were a bit anxious, a bit tight, and I thought that they were much a better team than they showed against Wales even though it came down to the wire.”
After beating Leicester in the final, O’Driscoll stated that Elsom was the best player he had ever played with. Nice to hear, if a little embarrassing?
“Yeah, well, he probably wasn’t including himself in that. He wouldn’t admit to playing with himself too often,” quips Elsom.
“But I think also the boys really appreciated it when guys would work hard. And you saw that with Isa (Nacewa). He was playing okay but then in the finals he just really turned it on, and the same with Stan Wright.
“I still remember the Quins game, it might have been Monye, one-on-one and he had a bit of space and he tried to take Stan on the inside and Stan iced him. You would bet your house that Stan couldn’t make that tackle, so I think there was a really big appreciation in the team for guys that worked hard.”
Once Elsom realised he would regret not going home, and particularly the idea of watching the Tri Nations, it was an easy decision to make.
“Like, an international you’re not part of? I’d rather stare at a wall. So, as soon as I thought I would regret it, then by staying everything that would have gone wrong or didn’t go the way I’d like it too, I would have resented it.”
He recounts an away game in Glasgow, his fifth match with Leinster, after two introductory derbies and two Heineken Cup games, and estimates the dressingroom was about the combined size of the two armchairs and table where we were sitting in the Burlington foyer.
“I would have had to wait for you to get up for me to put my boots on. There were about 300 people there, swirling wind, it didn’t go well, we got in late at night, everything went bad. But it was an experience, and I thought I might not be coming here again but I’m glad it happened. Whereas if I did that this season, and I hadn’t been able to play for Australia, that would annoy me. And that’s the same reason I came; I would regret not coming. In saying all of that it would have been very nice to do both.”
Even Elsom will surely benefit from his December holidays, which will include a trip back here, before resuming pre-season with his new franchise, the ACT Brumbies, in January. He likes being away completely from the game too.
“I’m reasonably private too,” he stresses. Home is near Noosa, a small picture-postcard resort town on the Sunshine Coast. “It’s really nice up there, because it’s very easy to get around, it’s very laid-back and there are nice beaches and good surf. Noosa is not as great a breaker as it used to be, but there are still plenty of little bays around that you can go to, particularly for Christmas. There’s a pretty good vibe around at that time.”
A long cry from Rockymania. It swept through the Leinster supporters and the way he remembers it, it was inspirational, such as when dropping the ball with his first touch in the Heineken Cup final. Cue the chant.
“That was great but you also felt like you had to do something. I mean, you can’t just go about your job and not do much. By the same token, it wasn’t really bad. I just think people were really good about it here. Even this week, they ask you for a quick autograph or photograph, that’s it. It’s pretty civil and it might happen a fair bit but it’s relatively painless.”
Beating the Poms in his second outing as captain can’t be bad, but he accepts, without doubt, that Ireland possess more strike players. “Throughout the whole side they’ve got guys who demand selection, and you don’t always get that in Test sides as much as you think you should.”
Australia are aspiring to having a settled, successful side like Ireland, and to that end he says this tour is vital in developing the likes of Digby Ioane. However, the Australian sporting psyche doesn’t cut their teams much slack, even when they are rebuilding and playing the best two sides in the world seven times on the bounce. Anything less than completing a Grand Slam tour might even be deemed a failure too. This, he says, can be both a positive and a negative.
“You just always think you’re going to win and I think the press are probably of the same mindset. You could roll out Sydney Uni and put them in Australian jerseys and they’ll go ‘well, you should win this’. Y’know?”
His only previous experience of captaincy was in his schoolboy days for eight games, and that was 10 years ago.
“There’s not always a lot you have to do, but when you do want to do something the challenge is putting it in and making the message effective. It has to be in line with where you want the team to go so that’s got to be the same as the coach, but I’m always really aware that blokes only take in so much, and sometimes trying to get two points across is too many.”
Elsom is very much his own man, and often the strong, silent type, so you wonder if he wouldn’t be happier in the trenches, but if he’d turned down the captaincy he wouldn’t have been true to himself.
“There’s things you want to do and there’s a way you want a team to run, and there’s no bigger opportunity to effect that than being the captain.”
Curiously, the rampaging Rocky runs aren’t as commonplace now as in his Leinster campaign. He’s more of a primary ball winner and the Tri Nations is a step up from the Heineken Cup, but Jim Williams concedes that it’s primarily because the Wallabies have struggled to go beyond three phases. Whatever the reason, it’s not that he’s being stopped in his tracks so much, more that the ball isn’t worked to him as much.
“There’s a good reason for that,” he smiles, pausing for a while and then adding enigmatically: “but, that’s not the plan, not carrying the ball as much.”
One imagines that it wouldn’t be a terribly difficult for an Aussie team to motivate themselves against the Poms. But here he and O’Driscoll will be tomorrow, with mutual appreciation and friendship intact, leading out their national sides against each other.
“Somebody asked me the other day if I’d be looking to put some shots on my old team-mates. If there was a list of everyone in the world I could put shots on they would be right down at the bottom. They just would be. But apart from that, you really want to play well. I think whether or not you hate the opposition is something different, and I think when you see people who really hate someone else, it distracts them. I think some guys get a lift out of it, but probably when they’re playing below their best.”
He’s still only 26 and were he to return to the Northern Hemisphere Leinster would surely be in pole position to re-sign him?
“It’s hard for me to say that I’ll definitely come back one day when I haven’t even joined my Super 14 team yet,” he says with a smile. “But I can think of plenty of worse places to go, and if it lined up so that I could come back here I think it would be fun.”
Rocky Elsom
Position: Flanker/Lock
Height: 197cm
Weight: 106kg
Date of Birth: Feb 14th, 1983
Club: Randwick
Provincial teams: Waratahs (2003–08 – 64 games, 10 tries), Leinster (2008-09 – 21 games, 6 tries), Brumbies 2009 – Tests: 46 (7 tries).
