GAME CHANGER
Galwey insists O’Connell will spark Ireland
IRELAND legend Mick Galwey has said the addition of Paul O’Connell to the coaching ticket can be a game changer ahead of the Six Nations.
With an out-of-sorts Wales first up for Ireland on Sunday, there is huge pressure on Andy Farrell’s men to get off to a winning start.
And with Grand Slam winner O’Connell coming in as forwards coach, Galwey believes his appointment can change the Irish mentality.
‘I’m not just saying this but having Paul O’Connell back in there, I think is going to change the temperament,’ Galwey told Paddy Power’s podcast From The Horse’s Mouth.
‘He’s going to bring something to the table that maybe the likes of James Ryan and these fellows haven’t seen before in an Irish dressing room. Because you need to have the passion and the bit between your teeth.
‘You need the bit of the bejesus, that’s the X factor.
‘You can be fit and skilful and have all those attributes that you need to be a professional
sportsperson, but you need to have that little bit of an X factor. ‘That’s what this Irish team needs. They need to get a bit of the heart and a bit of the aggression. ‘Of course, that doesn’t work unless you bring the discipline of playing the game on top of that.’ Galwey knows England are still the team to be measured against and says the Irish players must stop being bullied by their neighbours. ‘I think we need to get to the next level again, and when I say that the English have bullied us the last couple of years it’s not an easy thing to say, but I think the players themselves have realised that. ‘They’re not better players than us but they’ve been more physical than us and they’ve bullied us, basically. I know it’s a contradiction but you can be aggressive and play on the line, and that’s what England have done. ‘That’s why they got to the Rugby World Cup final.
That’s why they have been beating teams and that’s why they’ve been beating us the last three years. We need to change that. ‘I think we can beat France at home. We’ll certainly beat Wales; Wales seems to be in a mess at the moment. ‘We’ll beat Italy. We should beat Scotland. We need to beat England and to do that we need to meet fire with fire.’ Galwey had to frequently bounce back from disappointment during his storied career and admits that being dropped for the 1995 World Cup still rankles with him. ‘I still wonder to this day. To put it this way, in ‘93, I was good enough to be picked for the Lions. ‘Nick Popplewell and I were the only two Irish players to be picked for the Lions to go to New Zealand. ‘In ‘94 – and I can look back on it now, in ‘94 Shannon won the AllIreland league. Munster, we won the Interpros. ‘I can honestly say that I was never playing better. So to be dropped for the ‘95 World Cup was one of the hardest things to take. ‘Yet at the same time, I remember the day before the squad was announced Shannon were going for 10 AIL matches in a row. It had never been done. We had won the All-Ireland league. ‘There’s no doubt about it, to be dropped for the ‘95 World Cup is something I look back and think, what did I do wrong there? Nobody ever explained to me.’
He pulled the same long face 12 months later in Cardiff. This time it was Ireland going for the Slam, under Declan Kidney.
Were Wales to defeat them, they would win the title.
At the time, Munster were the outstanding team in Europe (soon to be overtaken by Leinster), and had a testy rivalry with the Ospreys.
At the time, the Welsh region were all big names and fake tans, but failed repeatedly in Europe (as they would later that year when Munster obliterated them in a European Cup quarter-final in Limerick).
Gatland alluded to club tensions in another clumsy pre-game intervention.
‘We have spoken about all the teams in the Six Nations and it’s Ireland who the Welsh players probably dislike the most,’ he announced. ‘Players’ experiences against Ireland haven’t always been the greatest, so they are very motivated to play against them.’ This came as news to many, including some Welsh players, and it prompted a sensation in the week of the game. So did his claim — quickly dismissed by Ireland — that the team had celebrated for over an hour and a half in a dressing room at Murrayfield after beating Scotland the week before the Welsh match. At the pre-match press conference, Gatland was asked to explain his comments and slumped into another sulk. ‘Perhaps in future I should take a leaf out of Declan Kidney’s book,’ he grumbled. ‘That’s probably the way to go in future, and then you get cliches and nothing. Maybe it has had the desired effect.’
This was a simply ignorant comment, and it showed Gatland up in a terrible light.
What it also seemed to reveal, though, was his enduring unhappiness with Irish rugby at how his time in charge of the national team had ended.
He made a show of himself with the comments in Cardiff, though, and his discomfort increased when Ronan O’Gara scored the most famous drop goal in Irish rugby history to win the Slam in injury time the following day.
One might note that games were played by one side, and one man, and by the time Joe Schmidt succeeded Kidney, Gatland had calmed down.
That Ireland were often far superior to his team changed the nature of the exchanges, too, as did Gatland’s increasing involvement on Lions tours.
It limited his room to question players if he was going to ask them to try and beat South Africa and New Zealand later in the season. There was, though, an undeniable thrill around some of those Ireland-Wales matches. These were two heavyweight sides, competing for big prizes.
That’s no longer the case. With Andy Farrell up against Pivac next weekend, it’s a case of two struggling sides and two unproven coaches battling for smaller, more personal prizes in Cardiff.