Irish Daily Star - Inside Sport
Tadhg was so good I knew we’d lose him
Brief SPELL with Llandovery Launchpad for beirne was a
Tadhg Beirne’s abiding superstition, his trademark, his constant rugby charm is his lucky blue scrum cap. he never plays without it.
Yet even a cursory glance at one of the most astonishing career paths, from amateur to international to Test Lion in just five years, shows a different coloured palette.
Red, gold, black, green, white, red, red, red, green, red — lotta ‘red’ there, huh?
Blue is the Leinster colour, his first club and an association that did not work out for either — albeit the club are only too aware that when it comes to the ‘Eadestown Easy’ and letting him go, they are, er, red-faced.
They indicated to Beirne, a product of their own academy, that there would be no contract for the 2015/16 season.
In the event, persistent entreaties from the player and an injury to another back-row saw him retained part-time until Christmas 2015.
On being cast adrift, he had made just four appearances, all of them as a sub and comprising just 39 minutes playing time.
Beirne, chastened but undaunted, would see out the rest of the season in the red, gold and black of his AIL club Lansdowne.
Fate
He was coached by former Wales Grand Slam winning coach Mike Ruddock.
The player’s fate was annoying Ruddock — he was clearly the best player in the AIL and, unable to understand why the player hadn’t got a professional contract, the Welshman tried to get Scarlets to bite.
The sense of doors shutting everywhere at this point is palpable; Scarlets boss Wayne
Pivac said all his contracts were accounted for, he had no money, but if Tadhg wanted to join a wider training panel on subsistence expenses he would take him on, find him a part-time job...
It’s at this point Llandovery RFC coloured, red, green and white take a hand, an aspirational club from a picturesque market town, most famous for a Harry Potter/hogwarts express type railway bridge to die for, nestling in the Carmarthen hills.
And where Head Coach Euros (pronounced ‘I-ross’) Evans was about to make a purely speculative phone call that would change the face of rugby as we know it.
Send
“We were desperate for second-rows that particular season and I asked John Daniels, the Scarlets rugby manager at the time, if he had somebody they could send in our direction.
“Tadhg’s name came up, John said he had come over from Ireland, recommended by Mike Ruddock and they didn’t really know a lot about him.
“John said he’s probably not going to be cutting into their first squad anytime soon, so you should see a fair bit of him and that he would sent him up to us.”
Llandovery’s opening game of the season was the ‘big’ one, against Cardiff at the famed Arms Park.
Veteran Llandovery Bryn Griffiths was the secondrow in situ: “That Tuesday at training the kitman called me over and said we had this Irishman in from Scarlets.
Says Griffiths: “That he had played a bit in a training spin type of match at the weekend and didn’t look up to much and ‘could I give a rousting and make sure he gets how important Saturday is’! How wrong could he be!
Tasty
“Tadhg was fantastic on the day and, mind you, they had an All Black in the second-row on the day (Jarrad Hoeata) and it got quite tasty at some points and he was able for that.
“I remember thinking our kit man must be nuts.”
It turned out to be a hot encounter, there were four yellow cards alone in an eight-minute spell in the second-half.
Says Evans: “Cardiff were particularly strong that day, with lots of professional players, if I remember correctly it was seven dropping down from the Cardiff Blues and Tadhg was our only ‘drop down’ player
“Tadhg was absolutely amazing, Man of the Match by a country mile — my reaction was ‘he is a bit good, we are probably not going to see a lot of him!’
“The next game was Pontypridd
at home in Llandovery, and he was equally as good, if not better — and that was it, he just played two games for Llandovery RFC.
“The reality was he was so good in those two games that the Scarlets had to give him an opportunity and it accelerated and everything improved for him from there.”
Wayne Pivac, then Scarlets boss and soon to be a Wales Grand Slam winning boss, takes up the story: “He was a last-minute signing, one of those ones where you haven’t got a lot of money left.
“The research we did all pointed that he was a good person first and foremost, so he
came in, he was looking for an opportunity, and he’ll tell you he was frustrated for the first part of that season because he was not getting a lot of game time but when he got his chance he excelled”
Meanwhile, mum Brenda is at home and concerned about the leaving of the blue-riband Leinster to move to Wales.
Injuries
“Just before the Scarlets he’d all these injuries and all the lads went off on their holidays in the month of June from Leinster and he begged Leo Cullen could he come in and have another chance,”she remembers.
“So he worked hard and it was just by chance that someone was out with an injury and he got a few months until Christmas 2015 but in the end he was released.”
Brenda Hyland-beirne’s tone changes for a split second, deepens and slows down:
“Before he went to Scarlets, he has been trying so hard to get through, I remember him saying ‘mom, I know I can do this, I’m almost there but I am not getting there’
“I’d say ‘Tadhg, I know you are trying, but I think it is maybe time to...’ because I saw the way he was trying.
“I didn’t actually know how bad off Tadhg was when he went over first, one of the lads couldn’t get over the state of his boots, it was the kicker Leigh Halfpenny, and he gave him a pair of boots.”
Pivac still can’t believe his luck, it was clear Beirne was a star, so much so the coach felt a bit of ‘ownership’ and having secured the Wales Head Coach role he spoke with the player — would Tadgh like to play for Wales?
“We got some money to sign Tadhg mid-season on a 35k deal, which was an absolute bargain, and, then, when he was mid-way through his second season we put a very good offer of around £210k in front of him and his agent which was rejected.
“He wanted to play for Ireland, we accepted that but we would have liked to have come to an accommodation with the IRFU and Ireland.
“Simon Easterby played for Scarlets and also with Ireland (2000-08) at the same time, Johnny Barclay has played for us and played for Scotland.”
Priority
Beirne, however, had been ear-marked as a priority and the IRFU were willing to offer him a deal to come back home and play for Munster for 2018/19 — Joe Schmidt had already indicated he would take the player on the 2018 summer tour to Australia.
Starring for the southern province, his Ireland place secured, Beirne was part of the 2019 Rugby World
Cup squad — playing a part in all five games — while Warren Gatland came calling in 2021, taking him on the Lions tour to South Africa, where he played two of the three tests.
Griffiths says he has followed his former second-row partner’s career with interest: “I felt he was special, he had all the skills, yes, and was tough enough, yes. But what impressed me in the short time he was here at Llandovery was he drove the 40 minutes up the road to train with us, the pro boys at Scarlets don’t have to.
“It was clear he was a good lad in much more ways than just on the pitch.”
As Evans shrugs, there is no such thing as a rugby secret in Wales.
“I knew before half-time in Cardiff he was too good to be left with us, so that was it.”