Brian Carney on his rugby and Junior ‘A’
Brian Carney on his career in rugby league, the move to union and that Junior ‘A’ crown
I thought, ‘look, if my career was to end after a year, I want tohave played for Wigan’
‘GIVE me a second there, mate’, Brian Carney says before taking a break from the call to attend to his dogs threatening to cause problems for sheep that were grazing in the neighbouring field, before eventually continuing, ‘I had a sheep issue the other day and I called a guy named Andy Farrington, who I played with on that Junior ‘A’ team, so he is my go-to man for advice when I have sheep issues.’
To paraphrase the old adage: you can take the man out of Valleymount, but you can’t take Valleymount out of the man.
Since 1998, Brian Carney has been making a life for himself in rural England alongside his family that welcomed a baby daughter two weeks ago. Carney may have long since left Ireland, save for a few years, but his way of life is not far removed from that of his past one.
When talking to Brian about his time growing up in Valleymount, it is easy to sense that he remains linked to that way of life. He attended St. Joseph’s National School, where he began playing GAA – both hurling and football. While he won a Junior county title with the local club, it was in rugby that he made his name. With a career stretching from 1998 to 2009, Carney established himself as one of this country’s finest rugby league exports by playing for some of the top clubs across both codes, including the Wigan Warriors and Munster, while also becoming a dual-code international for Ireland.
And yet, despite the storied tenures he had in both codes of rugby, it was his time with the Valleymount footballers that he considers the most satisfying of his career, namely when he was part of the team that beat Coolkenno to win the Junior ‘A’ county football championship in 1998. He doesn’t hesitate to describe that game – his last before relocating to England to play for his first professional rugby club, Gateshead – as the proudest moment of his sporting life.
‘For me growing up, playing for Valleymount was the big thing. Kids in St. Joseph’s national school would look up to the Valleymount main team. When I played, there were guys like Pat Mahon, who played on a Wicklow panel. That, for me, was like, ‘wow, I get to play for a bloke who played on a Wicklow panel.’
‘Winning the Junior ‘A’ championship, you did it with the guys that you saw every day; who you passed on the road; whose parents knew your parents; who you went to school with from when you were four years of age. That’s what made it so special.’
The Junior championship victory may be right at the top of Carney’s personal list of sporting achievements, but to those who would have followed him in subsequent years, it was in rugby that he made his name, and for good reason.
After starting rugby union in secondary school at Clongowes College, he was alerted to rugby league while in university in 1998. While his head had been turned, he still played GAA and would regularly travel back-andforth from football matches in the morning and rugby training in the afternoon, with the help of his Valleymount teammates.
In 1998, Nigel Johnson and Brian Corrigan recommended that Carney jump feet first into rugby league. He played for the Irish students’ rugby league team and impressed to such a degree that he was offered a professional contract with the newly-formed Gateshead Thunder in the Super League. After just one year, the club merged with the Hull Sharks to form Hull F.C.
At the end of his first season, the Wigan Warriors made an approach for his services. Once the 22-time league, five-time Super League Grand Final, 19-time Challenge Cup, and four-time World Club Challenge winners came calling, there was only one answer.
‘I did not know a lot about super league when I started professionally, but I knew the name of Wigan, so I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to play for them, even if it was just for a year. The contract was for three years, but I thought, ‘look, if my career was to end after a year, I want to have played for Wigan.’
‘Once I started understanding more about rugby league and started understanding the history and heritage of the game, Wigan is right up there. Arguably, the biggest club in the world, certainly in the top two rugby league clubs in the world.’
It was during his tenure with Wigan that saw Carney enjoy the first instance of silverware in professional rugby. While they came up short in two Super League Grand Finals in 2001 and 2003, both times to Bradford, they did manage to win the 2002 Challenge Cup in Murrayfield against St. Helen’s.
Whilst with the Warriors, Carney enjoyed what is possibly his most successful year in 2003. For that year’s Ashes series, he was called up to the Great Britain and Ireland team, making him the first Irishman to be called into the squad since Tom McKinney in 1957. He scored two tries over the course of the series, earning him the Player of the Series gong. Meanwhile, he was also named in the World Team of the Year the same year.
His burgeoning reputation in the UK ultimately led to clubs in Australia knocking on the door. After signing a pre-contract to join the Gold Coast Titans at the end of his Wigan contract, he brought his time with Wigan to an early end in order to sign for the Newcastle Knights; a decision he took in order to play at the highest level as soon as he possibly could, although he was aware of the pressure that came with playing in the National Rugby League.
‘I knew that I was going to the world’s premier competition. The way I looked at it was if I was going to avoid undoing any of the work I had done before as a professional player, I would have to be at the top of my game because a mediocre performance in the NRL would have me exposed.
‘The bonus to going over was that the players you were surrounding yourself with, on the whole, were amazing. I got to play with one of the greatest ever in Andy Johns. You can ask Dan Carter, you can ask Ronan O’Gara, you can ask Brian O’Driscoll to pick a player out of either code who can stand to scrutiny as being the best, and Andy Johns would be right up there.’
Underneath it all, Carney admitted to a sense of what he called ‘the tyranny of distance’. While he didn’t call it homesickness due to home being Valleymount, a village in which he no longer lived and hadn’t lived for almost 10 years, he never felt 100 per cent comfortable in Australia and being so far away from England. Due to this, in January 2007, after just a single training session, he met with Titans’ chief executive Michael Searle to explain his desire to close the book on his rugby league career.
He remained retired from rugby league until 2009. Before then, however, he said that he had English league clubs expressing their interest in taking on the winger who had only just turned 30. Instead, what tempted him out of exile was communication from Graham Steadman from the IRFU, who asked him if he would be interested in returning to Ireland.
After initially delaying the decision until such date that he could best deliberate what it would mean, Carney received an urgent message from the IRFU following a Wednesday night TV commitment, stating that he had a few hours left to make up his mind. Ultimately, he agreed to sign on and, the next day, he was having a medical before signing for Munster.
‘I loved it,’ the 43-year-old said, reflecting on his time with the province that included scoring two tries in his first two games and becoming the first-ever dual-code international by virtue of his callup to Irelands’ tour of Argentina. His career in professional rugby union spanned 24 games – 20 for Munster, four for Ireland – and
saw him score six tries – five for Munster, one for Ireland.
‘I could not have been at a better place that made me feel more welcome, with a nicer bunch of guys who were not very critical at all, certainly not to my face. I have nothing but positive words for the Munster club.
‘My housemate at the time was Paul Darbyshire, who was the S&C coach with Munster. Darbyshire sadly passed away with Motor Neurone Disease. The club, for me – I remember sending a message to the late Garrett Fitzgerald about this – the way the club looked after Paul, both players and the club as a whole, with his illness and with fundraising for him, is a mark for the organisation.
‘I will never forget that. I will make sure that his sons – my godchildren – never forget that.
‘When I got to stand for the national anthem in Argentina, representing Ireland, that’s a really special moment. I was always proud to pull on a green jersey, or a Great Britain and Ireland jersey with the representation on the crest.’
His time at Munster would come to an end in 2009. After not playing at all in his final year, he returned to England and rugby league with the Warrington Wolves. This is what proved to be his last club before retiring entirely at the end of the year. He made four appearances for the club, scoring two tries. It was in that fourth game that he sustained a broken arm, an injury that led to him calling it a day out of concern that he would not be able to apply himself in the way that he could have before.
Since he retired from rugby, Brian has started work as a pundit and presenter in the fields of both rugby and GAA. It is in the latter that he has been able to reignite his passion and admiration for all things gaelic games, having joined up with Sky Sports GAA as a presenter following the channel’s launch in 2014.
As an Irishman who lives in England and has lived in Australia, Brian has first-hand experience of describing the workings and traditions of gaelic games to those otherwise unfamiliar. Between being able to cover the sport for a living and describing it to new prospective followers, he said that he has gained a greater appreciation for it, the teams, and the players.
‘Football and hurling are particularly special. They’re outliers in the world we live in. I try and explain to people that I’d be going to cover a game in Dublin, with 90,000 people there, and the players were going to be from small communities. They’ll go back in a few weeks to play with their clubs and they won’t get a penny for it.
‘I don’t think anybody truly believes that it is possible. How can it be? They’d ask for explanations and they’ll ask, ‘well, where do they get their money from?’ And I’d respond, ‘well, they’ve got to get jobs.’ ‘Where do they get time to train?’ ‘Well, they just fit it in.’
When asked for specific highlights from his time as a GAA presenter, he says that being able to witness top-level hurling is something that he treasures.
‘‘I brought (Phil Clarke) to one of the hurling finals, I think it was 2016 or 2017, and he said: ‘if God was creating a game, either for television or for live spectators, it would be this one.’ It has everything; it’s got speed, it’s got frequency of scoring, the skill level is phenomenally high. I could watch them warming up all day.’
As a presenter, Carney’s approach to his work is methodically comparable with that of the late, great Bill O’Herlihy.
Shortly after ‘Billo’ passed away in 2015, Mick Dowling told the Irish Times that he never pretended to be an expert in the subject about which he was talking.
‘He always accepted that the analysts were the experts and he would try to draw that out by asking as many controversial questions as as he could,’ said Dowling.
When examining his own role in analysing and discussing matches, Carney is similarly honest.
‘When you are front and centre and part of the broadcast, you have the pleasure of going to games and being a small part. Obviously, nobody plays a bigger part than the teams on the field, but you are a small part of a very special day.
‘It is different for me doing rugby league because I have a degree of knowledge about the sport. When I go to cover (GAA) for Sky Sports, it is better for me as a presenter because there is no presumption of knowledge on my part, so I feel I have to ask better questions, more difficult questions of the pundits and of the experts.’
Now that his playing career is at an end, Brian is very reflective when discussing the merits of both sports. As someone who was not native to Wigan, Hull, Newcastle, or the province of Munster other than being born in Cork, he considers himself to be a ‘blow-in’ at all of those clubs, whereas Valleymount was part of the fabric of his DNA. Having shared both sides of the same coin, he is able to appreciate the familial aspect of sport, with young kids living their whole lives to play for clubs that he was fortunate enough to represent.
While he is confident that that attitude still exists by-and-large, he does fear that, the more sport goes the way of professionalism and the demand for success dictates recruitment and development, that community spirit will likely change as time moves on.
‘The guys I ended up played professional sport with – be it Munster or any of the rugby league clubs – there was always a large amount of those who wanted to play for that club or were followers of that club. That was not the case for me. Munster, for example, was made up of guys who were Munster through and through, the same as with Wigan. At Hull, they were guys who grew up wanting to play for Hull.
‘The longer things go and the longer you become removed from the amateur era and the ore times you get imported player like I was and less homegrown, that kind of dilutes it. I was (with Munster) at a time when the sense of community within the club could not have been any higher.
‘Valleymount certainly had that feel. That same community spirit was there. I am sure that Leinster, Munster, Connacht, and Ulster will endeavour to foster that same feeling, but it will get harder the less and less locals you have in your side, and that’s maybe the natural progression of professional sport.’
I will never forget that, I will make sure his sons - my godchildren - never forget that