Furrow in search of more finishing touches
get the one per cent,” he says.
“We’ve meetings in here and I struggle with back issues, posture and I get spasms in the chest and the stomach but I’ve a chair now in Felix (Jones)’s room that I bring into meetings and to help with posture.
“I don’t sit down at home anymore, I’m either trigger pointing or rolling around on the ground. I’ve something in my car to keep my back in good shape.
“Then it’s just fiddling around with diet and stuff, as a youngfella I was too ignorant to see things like that.
“Travelling and rooming with Paul a lot helped me to see the things you can do to get your body right as you get a bit older to help you have a longer career and have better health as well.”
Despite spending less time lifting weights, power has never been an issue for Earls who is a tenacious defender blessed with speed off the mark.
The simple explanation could be that his father, Ger, was a ferocious flanker in his day but there’s more to it.
“My mother is a strong woman as well,” says Earls, but only half in jest. “I don’t know, when I was growing up and even in the Academy I naturally always had a lot of power, natural power.
“I always did well in power scores, things like that, maybe it was from jumping walls in Moyross years ago, I don’t know.”
Earls is now the last remaining link to Munster’s last European success in 2008.
He was an unused replacement in Cardiff on the day O’Connell lifted the old Heineken Cup. Seventeen of the match-day squad have retired, the other four are plying their trade elsewhere.
Munster return to the startline tomorrow afternoon in Castres, aware of their history but determined to write a new chapter. The province’s European legend was built in the south of France.
“People made their names down there, going down to tough places and producing man of the match performances, winning down there,” Earls explains.
“We can thrive in the future but there’s a lot of different personalities now in the squad and we’ve to figure out our way of how to win down there.
“It’s hard not to keep going back to what Munster have done years ago. They won it their way and we’ve to try and win it ours.
“Some of the players they had back then, we don’t have them players anymore. Someone is not going to be like the Paul O’Connell, Alan Quinlan or Ronan O’Gara – you’re not just born with it.
“You can’t turn into someone else. We’ve to find our own identity, from a Munster standard anything without trophies is a poor season, but we have to be realistic too.
“We got to a semi-final in Europe and then a final last season, that’s good progress and hopefully we’ll go a step further this year.”
All of that was achieved despite the heartbreak of losing head coach Anthony Foley a year ago on Monday.
“If you can get through last year as a rugby player you can get through anything in life,” Earls recalls.
“I felt pressure going off my shoulders when Axel died, when it came to big games I used to get very nervous but that just put things into perspective.
“That Glasgow game the day after we buried him, obviously I got the red card, but if you can handle pressure in that environment with what was on the line, his legacy and winning for him then you’ve nothing else to worry about.
“This time last year was the last week he was alive, it’s in the back of your head.
“He is always in our thoughts and if we could hear him now, he’d tell us just to get on with it. ‘Forget about me and get on with it, show what you can do’.
“It is a sad time, it’s his family we think about. It’s going to be a sad couple of weeks for them. All we can do now is our best to keep his legacy going.”
He couldn’t cap a fine personal campaign with a place on the Lions tour and admits he was “a bit sickened” to miss out on selection.
Instead, he went to the United States and Japan with Ireland and found himself the senior man.
Suddenly, others were jotting down his words in their notebooks and following his lead.
“It’s weird, because half the time inside my brain I still feel like a young fella,” he insists, with a wry smile on his face. “I still want to learn, I’m looking around for people to learn off and the number of people seems to be getting smaller and smaller.
“There’s fellas coming up to me and asking me stuff, but I’m still learning a lot off them.”
Given the form he’s in, they could do worse than follow the man in black’s lead.