Former Ireland fly-half and Ulster’s Heineken Cup hero Simon Mason
WHEN you celebrate in Ireland, you don’t celebrate for a night, you celebrate for a week! So you can imagine what Belfast was like after Ulster won the Heineken Cup in 1999.
We had a bus tour around the city the day after we’d beaten Colomiers, picking up where we left off from the night before by passing around a bottle of Bushmills (whiskey). We didn’t think anybody would turn up to cheer us but by the time we got to City Hall, there must have been 20,000 supporters there; it was a sea of red and white.
One of the nice things about that run in the European Cup was that we did it with a largely homegrown squad, not a group of superstars like at Richmond, where at times it felt like if you had one bad game, they’d sign someone else on big money.
Sporting success meant so much to the people of Belfast as they’d gone through some rough times and they really got behind us. People would bump into you in the Post Office and wish you luck in the next game; you can’t put a price on that.
In those first few years after the game had gone professional, there was still a really nice balance between working hard and playing hard. Take our home quarter-final win against Toulouse for example. Stan McDowall was someone I rated as highly as Brian O’Driscoll, but he had lots of issues with his hamstrings. We were out celebrating at a Belfast restaurant and our coach, Harry Williams, had us downing shots. All of a sudden, Stan decided it would be fun to run up and down the parked cars outside. Everyone looked at Harry thinking he would give him a bollocking, but he just said, ‘right, I see Stan’s passed his fitness test for the semi-final!’
Ulster had managed to get Ravenhill up to the required 20,000 capacity for the semi-final against Stade Francais and the place was buzzing. The Stade team was full of megastars and nobody expected us to win. If I’m being honest, neither did we. We just didn’t want to be embarrassed in front of a packed house. But we outplayed them and won by playing some good rugby. David Humphreys went the length of the field and my kicking came good.
As an occasion, the final was fantastic. There were 50,000 people inside Lansdowne Road and 49,000 of them must have come down from Ulster. Fabien Galthie and Jean-Luc Sadourny had gone into the match carrying injuries and Humphreys peppered them with high balls and squeezed the life out of them. Every time we got a penalty I knocked the ball between the posts and ended with 18 points.
Winning the Heineken Cup is right up there in terms of my career achievements. I also won three Ireland caps, in 1996, after a really successful and enjoyable season with Orrell. I’d moved to Orrell from Gosforth, as it was closer to Leeds where I was studying at university alongside Austin Healey and Dan Luger. For me as a 10 Austin was great to play with. We came up through St. Anselm’s College together and he was always the most annoying player on the pitch – as far as either side were concerned. So instead of targeting me, they just tried to batter him which left me more space.
Orrell is a great club and I enjoyed the coaching of Mike Slemen and Sammy Southern, but the game went pro and everything went crazy. Richmond made me an offer I couldn’t refuse and I went there for a season, even though I knew it might harm my chances with Ireland as they weren’t in the Premiership at the time.
My ascent to the Ireland team from the Irish Exiles had been pretty rapid and I made my debut against Wales in the Five Nations. I kicked my points in a record win and got man-of-thematch. Two weeks later I played against England at Twickenham – another thing ticked off my wish list. On moving to Richmond the selectors had warned me that it would only take one bad game to drop me, and that happened after we lost to Western Samoa. I think they made 13 changes all told; that was the way it was back then in the Irish set-up, no stability whatsoever.
I moved to Ulster from Richmind but having missed out on the 1999 World Cup, I decided to take Bernard Laporte up on his offer to join Stade. Bernard wasn’t there long though and John Connolly came in. Game time was hard to come by and, with Diego Dominguez doing the kicking, I moved on. Andy Moore, an old team-mate at Richmond, was in Italy with Treviso and he sold the place. To finish with three years there, at a well-run club in a beautiful town, was a nice way to sign off.
Things have gone full circle now as I’m back teaching at St. Anselm’s as well as doing some coaching at Birkenhead Park, along with another St. Anselm’s old boy Martin ‘Cakes’ O’Keefe, under head coach Dave Blyth.