Irish Daily Star - Inside Sport
‘Back then you had to earn your stripes’
Rob Kearney’s brilliant book, No Hiding, made for some disturbing reading on its release in 2020.
It revealed ‘cliques and caucuses’, while Michael Cheika, Kearney claimed, seemed to single him out day in, day out for the hair-dryer treatment.
And while he baulks at any suggestion of bullying, and it certainly stopped short of anything we have heard from English football dressing rooms.
Consider these passages relating to his first 18 months or so, having just left school and joined Leinster:
“In those early days, the Leinster dressing room was a place of cliques and caucuses,” writes Kearney.
“Denis Hickie, Shane Horgan and Brian O’Driscoll were the three musketeers, the true hotshots of their day and the dominant figures in the room.
“From the outside there was this view of me as being the rising star of the domestic game. Meanwhile, inside the Leinster dressing room, nobody would give me the time of day, not even a hello. I was very aware I didn’t fit in. I found it an alien place.”
“I would have thought they would have looked out for me a little bit but Shane and Brian had very little time for me back then.
“If anything, it was probably the opposite. Just a coolness. No chat. No, how are you going today. No banter. No interaction whatsoever.
None we of the older lads ever came to me to say, don’t pay any attention to the shouting.”
Kearney survived; there was 95 Ireland caps, a Grand Slam, man of the match in the first win over the
All Blacks (in Chicago), 2019 Leinster caps, four Heineken wins; he is a 2009 and 2013 Lion.
Book
“Look, it’s always important that you can stand over what you say in a book,” he says of that period.
“And I can honestly say, ‘well, that’s how I felt at the time’.
“I think back in that era it was quite old school and there was a mantra where you had to earn your stripes within the squad to be to be seen as a peer.
“It was always viewed as what the young guy does is he shuts up, he
keeps his head down and he gets on with his work.
“Environments nowadays are an awful lot more inclusive, you try and make the younger guys feel a part of the atmosphere and a part of the club as quickly as possible because that’s when you’ll get the best out of them.”
It is important to note too that a few seasons later he was best mates with all involved.
Kearney accepts his own demeanour in the early days may have been partially at fault - and that not everyone in the Leinster dressing room was deaf and dumb to his plight.
“If there was a bit of cockiness about me, though, that was how I thought I was expected to act around these guys. I got that pretty wrong.
“If I was a young guy coming into an established environment and today I would expect people to keep an eye out to make sure that I integrated well.
“Girvan Dempsey was warm and helpful, Gordon D’Arcy was different. I was grateful to have a decent relationship with Gordon, and Girvan Dempsey was consistently generous.”
No Hiding, in part, is a brilliant take on a previously closed door of the Leinster dressing room.
It would be enlightening to hear some other voices, particularly from those involved, on this topic.