FROM THE BLINDSIDE:REVENGE IS a very strong word. It implies that you want to get back at somebody for something bad they've done to you, some great injustice you've suffered because of them.
That’s why I think it’s wrong to look at Ireland’s Six Nations opener on Sunday as a revenge mission against Wales. If Ireland are going to look for revenge on anyone, it’s more likely they will be looking to take revenge on themselves, so to speak.
Wales put them out of the World Cup through a very smart gameplan and some brilliant rugby. But Ireland will have come away feeling like they didn’t perform. They didn’t do enough to reach that holy grail of a World Cup semi-final. If anyone did them wrong that day, it wasn’t the team in red.
All Wales did was turn up and play to the best of their ability. Ireland didn’t do that on the night so if they’re up for revenge on Sunday, it’s in the mirror they should be looking.
The mental challenge is a big one against Wales, although it has changed a little over the years. When I started off playing against Welsh teams, it all felt a little bit surreal to me. You were coming up against players from a country where rugby was a religion so straight away you felt you were on the back foot a little bit.
The only thing I knew about Wales and Welsh people was they lived for rugby so when you’re a young guy going over there to play, you know you’re entering an environment that is just rugby all the way.
It can be daunting, or at least it was to me back then when we were coming over from Ireland where rugby still hadn’t really broken out of the heartlands.
If you grew up in a place where the GAA was everything, it was a big leap to think you could just walk into a place where rugby was all-consuming and start showing them how it’s done.
We went to play Cardiff with Munster in 1997 and they put 40-odd points on us. I remember being in awe of a lot of the players I was going up against – big, physical men who were looking for inexperienced players to bully around the place.
They always tried to intimidate you physically. Their rugby culture was hard and it was sometimes dirty as well. You could see they’d grown up fighting each other tooth and nail and it made them into seriously physical rugby players. They took no prisoners and spared nobody.
You wouldn’t lie on the wrong side of the ball for very long against them, put it that way.
But as the years went by, we gradually got to grips with the idea that there was no reason Irish rugby couldn’t be just as good as Welsh rugby.
Our mindset had to change to compete with them. It didn’t matter they had tradition and knowledge and a passion for it that was more widespread than we would have had over here. They were just another Celtic nation.
As well as that, it’s been obvious down the years there’s a flip-side to the Welsh passion for the game. It’s great in the good times but it leads to huge pressure when things go against them. Every town and village and club is filled with people who know their rugby and love their rugby and if you’re a Welsh international in a team that isn’t winning, your whole country will have an opinion on your performance.
I’ve always felt it has meant the highs are higher for them than for other countries but the lows are lower as well.
Sometimes it means they turn on their own. They can really get after their players when things go wrong and give them terrible stick. Colin Charvis had a rough spell as captain even though he was one of the most-capped Wales players of all time. That’s the one big downside to everyone being so emotionally invested in their national team.
But when they’re on the up, they think they’re the best in the world. When a Wales team is really clicking, they bubble with confidence and they fancy themselves against anyone.
Most Welsh people just naturally think they should be at the top table in world rugby and so when they do go on a good run, they’re very comfortable with it. They never feel like they don’t belong.
And when it came to playing Irish teams, I always sensed they had a confidence that told them they should be beating us. Some might have seen it as cockiness but I saw it more as them reassuring themselves they ought to have the number of most Irish teams.
I think they saw us as coming from a country where rugby might not have seemed that big a deal to an outsider looking in. They had that aura where they expected to win every time.
It definitely annoyed them when we started beating them more regularly. The intimidation factor disappeared completely at both club and country level. When their union started changing their whole system around and make it more region-based, it looked like they were doing it to try to replicate the success of the Irish provinces in the Heineken Cup.
So all of a sudden, they were taking ideas from Irish rugby. Tradition, rugby culture, all of it didn’t count for as much now because as far as we were concerned, we were able to beat them on a pretty regular basis.
Part of it was down to the structures but I always felt that part of it too was down to the Irish provinces stealing a march on them in terms of fitness and conditioning. There’s no doubt the fitness levels in Irish rugby were raised to a higher level a few years ahead of it happening in Wales.
At provincial level, there were a couple of seasons where you knew you were stronger man-for-man than your Welsh opposition. It wasn’t a massive gulf or anything but you knew you’d be still going strong if the game was in the balance come the closing stages. They knew it too.
Welsh rugby just took that little bit more time to get up to speed. I’m not sure why but I’d imagine it had something to do with all that tradition and all that culture.
Because rugby is such a religion over there, it can be difficult to enforce wholesale changes very quickly. Whereas in Ireland we’d been through a long period without success, Wales were still capable of winning a Grand Slam every few years playing silky, off-the-cuff rugby.
They always had such hugely talented players and maybe that’s why there didn’t seem to be such an emphasis on size and strength over there as there was over here.
They gradually got envious of the success we were having. When Warren Gatland was trying to stir up trouble between the sides a couple of years back, people were quick to say there was nothing in his comments about Welsh players and Irish players not liking each other.
And I can honestly say there was never any bad blood that I was aware of. But I did think he was probably just reflecting a few of things they might have been saying in training or in team meetings.
Welsh teams were constantly losing to Irish teams in the Heineken Cup and we were dominating the Magners League as well. So it would have only been natural for Welsh players to resent that. The confidence that had served them so well down the years was being upset by a bunch of Paddies who were well able to come over and beat them on their home patch. Outside of the years when they won the Grand Slam, we nearly always got the better of them at international level as well.
They must have been getting sick of that. It’s only natural that they would be. I definitely found they would get a bit more frustrated as the years went by and I’d say Gatland just took a couple of small little things and ran with them to see could he get a reaction.
He’d have been trying to foster a bit of an edge and bounce off any little bit of bitterness they might have had. A coach will try all sorts of things to get his team jizzed up and maybe he saw just that little bit of envy in them and tried to blow it up into something bigger. He doesn’t have to do that these days. Wales were brilliant at the World Cup and were unlucky to miss out on the final. There’s no difference in strength or fitness any more – those days are long gone.
Wales are young and fast and huge and they’ve been over to Poland for their big training camp before the Six Nations just as they were before the World Cup. It’s a humdinger of a match to start off the tournament, with both countries knowing they can’t afford to lose it.
All in all, I fancy Ireland to make home advantage count.
