Gerry Thornley discovers Eddie O'Sullivan, following his experience in the US, believes in the collective approach to coaching

A Connacht player once approached Eddie O'Sullivan and accused the coach of dropping him because O'Sullivan didn't like him. Wrong move. As pretty much anybody who's come across the Irish coach knows, sentiment or popularity contests don't come into it.

"Listen, I don't have to like you to pick you," was the gist of O'Sullivan's reply. "We don't have to be friends,

we don't even have to have a drink together. It wouldn't matter if you were my greatest enemy, if I thought you'd help us win the match, I'd pick you."

O'Sullivan then went on to give the player detailed reasons for his omission. In that, O'Sullivan would be as thorough as in any other aspect of his coaching, not least because, like virtually all coaches, it is the aspect of his job which he hates the most. Bullshit a player and they'll see through it, he says. So, though it doesn't make his breakfast go down any easier, he gives it to them squarely on the chin.

O'Sullivan isn't looking to win popularity contests. He's looking to be successful, bottom line. In a sense, the background to his arrival is fitting. The groundswell of sympathy toward the popular Warren Gatland won't have bothered O'Sullivan unduly. Come tomorrow fortnight against Wales, and what happens on the pitch will supercede everything else.

There are many adjectives which describe O'Sullivan. Well-organised, focused and driven are common ones. "You know where you stand with Eddie. He's very disciplined, very single-minded, and certainly likes to be the boss," says Eric Elwood.

"At Connacht, where the raw material wasn't as good as the other provinces, he was just what we needed. He led us by the hand and he's very knowledgeable as regards both forward and back play. He's very professional and very thorough and I had absolutely no problem with him as a coach."

Another Connacht/Irish player who had plenty of experience working with O'Sullivan is Noel Mannion, who says O'Sullivan was the coach who dropped him the most and chewed him up the most. Yet Mannion qualifies most of his comments by stating that he is "a very close friend".

"Having said that, in all those years he's still a very hard guy to know. He's a very private guy, absolutely focused and totally dedicated. He's a pure professional."

Last Wednesday, in Brian O'Brien's room in Limerick's Castletroy Hotel, O'Sullivan granted an interview that wouldn't have had him jumping out of his bed that morning and chirping while he was shaving. Yet, few talk so fluidly about rugby.

O'Sullivan had a professional mindset long before the game went professional. He was pumping weights and earning the monicker "Beach Boy" within the Garryowen squad not only long before it was trendy but when building body muscle was still mistrusted.

The background made the man. His first club was his home town club, Youghal. From mini-rugby, through the under-age ranks, through to Munster Junior Cup at outhalf as a 15-year-old. After studying physical education, maths and science at Thomond College, now University of Limerick, it was through a meeting with Tony Ward that he moved to Garryowen.

That maths was a struggle for him subsequently helped him as a teacher in the subject. "I wouldn't have been a mathematician. Like, some people can look at a maths problem and solve it in three lines, I'd need seven or eight lines to get through it, so that helped me as a teacher."

Obliged to move to the wing, it was then that the nine-and-a-half stone O'Sullivan lifted weights and began training during the summer. Getting stronger, fitter and faster, he broke into the Munster squad. Coinciding with the era of Keith Crossan, Trevor Ringland and Moss Finn, one B cap was the summit. "I didn't have a problem with that. It wasn't that I felt hard done by. I thought Crossan and Ringland were marvellous wingers. I just came along at the wrong time maybe."

Unsurprisingly, O'Sullivan comes across as one of those rare former players who was pretty much fulfilled by what he achieved, knowing that he didn't leave himself short. You sense, perhaps, that he's probably harder on those who don't.

By the age of 28, even before he became one of the first IRFU development officers in 1989, he was already, he admits, thinking of coaching Ireland.

He'd started coaching in Galway at Monivea (near his home in Moylough) six years previously. His biggest influence was PJ Smith, his one-time coach at Garryowen. "Unfortunately he doesn't coach any more and is a loss to the game. He was the guy that got me thinking about coaching."

O'Sullivan hasn't stopped since, though he briefly returned to teaching in Mountbellew for two years in the mid-1990s, and various portfolios overlapped.

A big break came when George Hook brought him aboard Connacht as an assistant in 1989, where he stayed involved as assistant or head coach until 1995. He also took over from Dr Mick "Bomber" Browne as head coach in Blackrock - "my first job as head coach, that was a great thrill" - while in his final year at Connacht. And he was coaching a vintage Irish under-21squad (a host of whom are now in the current senior squad) and Galwegians.

"The way I saw it then I was obviously very motivated to become a good coach so I tried to get an angle on every dimension to the game in terms of coaching."

At Monivea, he coached under-age and junior sides; at Blackrock the senior team and the school team.

Aside from the range of teams, technically he's also been a fitness adviser, a specialist forwards' coach and specialist backs' coach, while his degree makes him qualified in PE and sports psychology, too. O'Sullivan also coached the girls basketball team in Mountbellew, and the Connacht schoolboys' basketball team.

"Actually basketball coaching is tremendous because it's very structured and very intensive due to the proximity of the playing area, and two time-outs per half, and at that time you couldn't even talk to rugby players at half-time. So it made you coach at every available opportunity."

Time was when twice a week he'd teach in Mountbellew by day, hop in his car at 4.0 p.m. and drive to Dublin, take two sessions with forwards and backs, then hop back in his car, get home by midnight and into school the next morning. "I suppose you have to be driven by what you want to do."

He combined commuting to the United States as assistant coach to the Eagles with coaching Buccaneers for two seasons, the latter mostly in the winter.

"At 6.30 you'd look out the window and it was dark and lashing rain, and you'd jump in the car and 40 minutes across to Athlone. The pitch is going to be flooded, it's going to be raining and you're going to have three layers of gear. 'Jeez, I don't have to do this. I could be sitting at home by my fireplace'. But you get there and 10 minutes into the session you're up to your ankles in mud, and it dawns on you that this is where you want to be."

Although some might feel that there could be few benefits from operating in the amateurish outpost of American rugby, O'Sullivan begs to differ. "You could throw your hands up in the air and say 'why?' But my view was 'why not?' If you couldn't learn something in that situation you'd be a total idiot. In the American system the coaches' roles were very defined and the one thing I learned to do was to coach your ass off every day."

Commuting to America as assistant coach to the Eagles for six months of the year for two years does make huge demands, however.

"It demands a tremendous amount of support from your family. They probably lose out more than I do because I'm out there at the coalface doing what I want to do. Coaching in America at international level was a fantastic experience for me."

Buccaneers also served to keep his name in lights, aside from developing other techniques, such as lineouts. "Which was very important at Buccaneers," he says.

A quasi-managerial role, a laClive Woodward, is not for the hands-on O'Sullivan. "You need to keep your feet in the mud because you can do too much macro-management and not enough micro-management and you lose touch with the game. So I don't ever want to not get muddy. The challenge for me is to delegate the work to the assistant coaches and to also be in there with them, helping them with their jobs so I'm not divorced from what's going on."

When first coming in as assistant to Gatland, O'Sullivan sought initially to earn the respect of the players. "It's not about being liked, it's about being respected. I don't actually mind somebody coming up to me and saying 'I actually don't like you'. Fair enough, nobody likes everybody. But if someone said to me I don't really respect you as a coach that would be the kiss of death for you."

As an assistant, he says, you get the chance to stake your marker, to not be overlooked when the main job comes up, but says he could have carried on as assistant to the World Cup. "I wasn't frustrated in terms of 'I want the job now', but America did offer me a job and I had to look at it. But it was never a question of 'if I'm not the coach now, I'm going to go somewhere else'. That never arose."

O'Sullivan argues that he and Gatland had a good working relationship, encompassing healthy differences of opinions. "He's a very private guy and so am I. He didn't hang around the hotel lobby having coffee with everybody who came by. That's not his style and it's not mine. But to be fair to Warren, he let me have a free hand and I thought we got on well. If you can't argue the toss there's something wrong. I've got three other coaches working with me and if they don't argue with me I'm not going to be any wiser."

Bearing that in mind and, as he says, the buck ultimately stops with him, it seems extraordinary that O'Sullivan didn't choose his own assistant coach, especially given that he and Declan Kidney supposedly didn't have the most harmonious of relationships before now.

"All I can say in this case is I didn't have a problem with the number two. Now if I had a problem with the number two then maybe it would have been a different discussion with me. It would probably be the best thing in the world to be able to pick everybody, but Declan was suggested to me and I had no problem with Declan.

"You see, again there was an implication that myself and Declan didn't get on. The differences that occurred between myself and Declan weren't myself and Declan. There were differences between the provincial directors and the national management, on the management of the fatigue of players," says O'Sullivan. "Tension was built up, but it was all about resting players. People say 'you didn't get on', but I've known him 12 years and we've always got on."

On the face of it, four coaches operating in tandem could become cumbersome, regardless of clashes. The way O'Sullivan describes it, one coach runs a session, with others contributing to it. O'Sullivan might stand in as Kidney does a backs run, Niall O'Donovan a lineout session or Mike Ford on defensive drills, while O'Sullivan runs a team run or a continuity drill, but the others will contribute.

"There is a tradition in coaching in Europe that there's only one voice on the field and when one person is talking only one person can talk and when you interject as a coach you're undermining the leader. I don't buy into that at all. I used to buy into it because I was brought up that way, but America showed me that if everybody is contributing it's better."

O'Sullivan has a tough act to follow, and it was put to him during the week that the natural follow on to third in the Six Nations two years ago and second last year is well, first. His response is to emphasise consistency of performance levels over 80 minutes and over the championship, and to let results take care of themselves. Yet, however unfairly at times, at Test level, a coach is judged by his results.

O'Sullivan doesn't feel the weight of that expectation yet; the one striking, strange difference he does notice is the greater public recognition. That will increase before he eventually rides off into the sunset.

What would he like his legacy to be? After his longest pause, his voice dims to its lowest level, a tad grimly almost. "That the Irish team in that time developed to deliver a level of performance that the Irish public was happy to support. People wanted to watch them play. I don't think you can do that every game, but if people look back and say 'didn't they do well?', that's all you can ask for in a team."

An hour or so on and he's still talking. Eventually he skips out of the room as he's running fractionally late for a video session to analyse the Welsh with video analyst Mervyn Murphy and the other three coaches. It's only just gone 3.0 p.m. but he reckons it'll run until past midnight.

Eddie O'Sullivan has reached his Holy Grail, and whatever happens next it won't be for the want of thoroughness.

On the insecurities of his profession

"Professional sport is precarious but I think you just back yourself in all these positions. I'll go in and do as good a job as I can. There's an element of luck in whether things fall your way on the field,

but I think the better organised you are and the harder you work, the luckier you get."

On the worst part of being a rugby coach

"Dropping a player has to be the worst and it's a job you have to do honestly. I've dropped many players in my time and it always spoils your breakfast. If you bullshit a player they'll see it a mile. They'll never agree with you, so you need to be clear in why you're doing it.

You accept that you may not be right, and if you're wrong be the first to accept it."

On balancing the next game with long-term planning for the World Cup

"You have to look forward but you can look too forward as well. And you can start

convincing yourself that you need to bring players in two years down the track.

But the here and now is the most important."

On the best part of being a coach

"The most enjoyable aspect of coaching is planning something itraining and watching it

happen in real time. The one that springs to mind is Tyrone's try against South

Africa. That's 'O'Sullivan's'. It's the same play as Geoghegan's try against England

and it still cracks 'em wide open if you do it properly. There's no better feeling in coaching."