It’s been one of Tadhg Furlong’s more frustrating campaigns.
While he played all three of Ireland’s November wins and returned to start the final two games of the Grand Slam, last Saturday’s win over Ulster was only his second start of the season for Leinster. He’s a two-time Lions series starting tighthead, and yet almost feels like a new signing.
“It’s nice to be a rugby player again,” he says, only half-jokingly, as opposed to what he self-deprecatingly calls “a professional rehabber”. Maintaining the theme, he adds: “I had to change the job title back on LinkedIn.”
After missing all of Leinster’s pool games either side of the festive derbies, he was “flying” in the build-up to the Six Nations only to reinjure his calf during the pre-tournament camp in Portugal. So, he resolved to work hard and target the game away to Scotland.
Nor did he have any doubt that he would make it back for that round four match.
“There were no red flags. It was all quite straightforward and clean cut. It just needed a bit of time and a bit of lovin’ to get it right. It was not something you can push or speed up massively.”
Furlong watched the opening three games as a member of the squad, per se, but only insofar as he was rehabbing in the IRFU HPC in Blanchardstown.
“It’s kind of a weird one to be half in/half out and trying to see some of the stuff they were planning on, going into the game, like the inside ball for Finlay [Bealham]. You knew that was coming,” Furlong says of Bealham’s inside pass for Hugo Keenan’s try against France.
“I was watching it with friends of mine and Seánie O’Brien was beside me, and you are very much a spectator, but with a small bit more inside knowledge about what’s going on.”
Speaking of Bealham, who made his first three Six Nations starts in Furlong’s absence, Furlong says: “Over the last two years Finlay has been, I think, genuinely playing really well. Not that he wasn’t a very good player to start with, but he’s really added loads of layers to his game. It is great to see.”
Furlong then played over an hour of what he describes as “one of those unique kinds of games” in Murrayfield, with him packing down alongside Cian Healy at hooker from early in the second half, even to the amusement of the Scottish front row.
“Yeah, they were laughing. We were binding up for the first scrum and they were like ‘who’s hooker?’ Because they’re just looking at three props. ‘Dealer’s choice lads!’ Who do you pick?” says Furlong with a hearty laugh.
His energy levels felt good, albeit he felt he was a little reactive rather than proactive. Furlong’s rustiness may have been a factor in him making three very uncharacteristic handling errors against England, but he sounds as unperturbed now as he looked at the time.
Next moment focused is now more than a mantra.
“It’s a hard thing to do, to actually do it, to stay calm and actually move on if something bad happened, but it’s something we’ve been working on for two or three years. It’s very much a collective thing and some lads will share how they do it, maybe some of the more experienced lads.
“It’s not just trying to pay lip-service. I think every team in the world wants to do it, and we’re not where we want to be with it either yet. But it is just trying to actually do it.”
It’s also become a defining feature of the current Irish and Leinster teams, and at least Furlong was ultimately one of those winning a second Grand Slam, and first ever to be clinched in Dublin.
No two such triumphs are every quite the same and while James Ryan, older and wiser, admitted he appreciated this one more than 2018, for Furlong it was different in another way.
“You always felt there was an expectation to do it this time around. I don’t know how you lads felt about it, but it was nearly an expectation and it’s something that we acknowledged, I suppose.
“Probably the hysteria wasn’t there that there was in 2018. But I suppose it was acknowledging that we worked hard for this. We felt like if we played our good rugby we could achieve it and I suppose that’s as much a shift in mindset as anything.
“It’s something we had set down at the start of the tournament. We knew it was at home, and never been done. It is nice doing stuff for the first time, but at the same time I don’t think lads got ahead of themselves. They didn’t think: ‘This is it!’
“We think there’s more in us. We think we can keep growing and walk towards a World Cup. Wherever that brings us, it brings us, but I think there is that acknowledgment of it.”
Another flip side of his limited game time this season is that, as Furlong declares, he’s “as fresh as paint”, adding: “No, generally, the body feels really good.”
This is the first time he’s had this feeling “in a long time”, revealing this was not so at the 2019 World Cup.
“I was only just talking to my physio about it. My body was in absolute bits at it. I had so many niggles and I had probably undertrained, because I’d gone through a lot of rugby without getting injured, and sometimes when you get injured, you get an eight/10-week break, and you start hitting the gym hard.”
The Leinster pack flexed their pecs last week but Furlong knows that brings no guarantees tonight.
“Everything starts at zero. That’s the thing, every time you go out you have to prove it again, and that’s just rugby.”
In an interesting subplot, Furlong will be coming up against James Cronin, whom he knows from Irish camps.
“A good scrummager, a big man, a big block of a man, like most of their pack to be fair. Good scrummagers.”
As ever, Stuart Lancaster’s knowledge of English teams will be particularly insightful in weeks like this.
“Stuart understands people in the English game very well. He also knows how to set up a team and get us ready.”
And if last weekend doesn’t count for anything, then neither does last season’s quarter-final win in Welford Road.
“It was a hard game over there last year. I think they’re playing well, especially in the last six or seven weeks; there’s some good results in there.
“The players they have, the way they’re coached, what they’re about, it’s a proper European club Leicester, and I think the lads are excited. We know it’s a big game. It’s always a big game.”
He is sitting down with the media in a room at Leinster’s HPC which has a montage of teams in blue celebrating trophies, but two final losses since the fourth Champions Cup five seasons ago fuels the desire for a fifth star.
“Sure, it’s what it’s all about. Look behind you. Look at all the pictures on the wall. That’s what the club wants to do. We haven’t won Europe since 2018. We’ve got close lots of times. There’s no lack of desire there. It’s on us to go out there and try to prove that we’re good enough to win it.”
