Knights brought out best in me
IF you’d have told me when I saw Neil Back slap the ball out of Peter Stringer’s hands in the 2002 Heineken Cup Final at the Millennium Stadium that I would have played for both clubs, albeit only one game for Leicester, I’d have laughed at you.
I was in the crowd that day, as a starry-eyed 14/15-yearold, and never had any designs on becoming a professional rugby player although I did come from a rugby background as my aunt (Grainne Cross) played for Ireland and my dad and uncles played for years. In Limerick, sport is everything.
It was amazing that I was able to pull on Munster jersey, disappointing that I didn’t do it more but amazing, nonetheless.
Keith Earls and I grew up together and came from the same club so it was great to break through at the same time as him. Anthony Foley and Ian Costello were the coaches of the A-team in my first year and we reached the final of the British & Irish Cup, against Cornish Pirates in Camborne, with people like Peter O’Mahony, Mike Sherry, Conor Murray and Simon Zebo in the squad.
I was also involved in the first team squad that 2009/10 season, as a lot of the guys had been away on Lions duty in South Africa during the summer and us younger lads were needed for pre-season training.
My first Magners League appearance was as the starting 10 away to Connacht in April 2010, and we won 1812. Seven or eight of us made our debut on the day.
The weirdest thing for me was hearing my name on the radio when they announced the team while I was driving home from training.
With Ronan O’Gara, Paul Warwick and Ian Keatley in the squad, I never really had much of a look-in after that.
I decided it was time to try something new and had an enjoyable six months with Bizkaia Gernika in Spain. We beat Rovigo twice in the Amlin Challenge Cup, becoming the first Spanish team to win in Europe, so it was nice to play a little part in the club’s history. Mind you, we got tonked by Worcester and Perpignan! The post-match food in Spain was something else, although the Donny ‘Cow Pie’ still takes some beating in my book. Before I got to taste one of those, I had a two-season spell at Plymouth, initially under Nat Saumi and then James Shanahan and Graham Dawe. Nat and Dawesy were complete opposites. Nat let you throw the ball around a bit and have a bit of fun. I experienced a hell of a lot there; we should have gone into administration. There was a huge turnover of players – I played with 92 different players in those two-and-a-bit years – and it eventually led to relegation and me moving on.
That summer, I had a couple of Champ clubs interested in me. I knew a couple of the boys at Donny and they said I would enjoy it at Castle Park.
Everything they said rang true. The first couple of years there were probably my most consistent. Clive Griffiths, left, Glen Kenworthy and Paul Cooke gave us licence to try out things, and it worked in terms of results too.
We played Bristol four times that year, including a win down at their place, and I think they beat us by a point on aggregate.
It was like the perfect storm in that ten or so players all seemed to have their best seasons at the same time, in the backs people like Will Hurrell, Tyson Lewis and Paul Jarvis were on fire.
I’d fallen out of favour a little bit in my third season at Donny but, out of the blue, Leicester asked whether I’d want to go there as cover for the LV= Cup.
You don’t need asking twice when a club like that come calling. It turns out that the game against Wasps at the Ricoh, on Super Bowl Sunday, was the last professional game I started in because three or four weeks later I did my ACL, in a game for Doncaster.
I was coming up to my 30th birthday and was looking for one more contract but it wasn’t to be and I went into coaching, first as a sports teacher at a school for troubled kids from a referral unit. It was very rewarding but also hard work.
Now, I’m coaching at York University and at York RUFC. It’s an unbelievably well-run club, they’re a National League club in all but name really.
“I played with 92 different players in two-and-a-bit years at Plymouth”