BLOODGATE WILL ALWAYS BE A PART OF US...
But we’re only looking forward these days, insists Harlequins coach O’Shea
LEANING casually against an Aviva Stadium premium level wall, while taking a breather from his RTÉ punditry slot during Ireland’s win over Australia, Conor O’Shea has his stock answer well-rehearsed. With next Sunday marking Leinster’s first visit to the Stoop since the infamous 2009 Bloodgate quarter-final cheating farce plunged Harlequins into crisis. O’Shea, who joined the Londoners 11 months after Tom Williams’ fake blood capsule caper cost coach Dean Richards his job, knows the approaching rematch will bring the whole sorry saga back into the spotlight.
No problem, he shrugs. Every club, he claims, has good and bad history and Bloodgate was just one of those bad chapters in Harlequins’ backstory.
It’s the bright side that more interests him, the club emerged from the eye of that storm five-and-a-half years ago to transform itself into the well-respected trophy-winning, title-chasing entity that Leinster will encounter twice in the coming weeks.
‘As a club we’ve moved on massively,’ says O’Shea who watched that controversial ’09 duel from his home in London while working for the English Institute of Sport.
‘It’s part of our history and always will be. But as I said at the time (when I joined Quins) and I’ll still say it, there’s good and bad. Great victories and losses – and Bloodgate will always be part of that.
‘I’m sure there will be a lot made of it. It’s the two teams who have achieved so much since that day coming back together. Leinster won three Heineken Cups, including that year.
‘It was 6-5 that match, a quarterfinal. On such small, tight margins are big trophies and destinies shaped. That’s how things happen. A loss in that match and who knows where Leinster would have gone.’
Winger Williams, who was forced to bite into the fake blood capsule in order to come off the pitch and enable hobbling kicker Nick Evans return as a blood replacement in the hope of landing the drop goal to win the match, hasn’t been seen yet this season.
He’s had surgeries to solve calf problems and isn’t due back until around Christmas, which is just as well as he would have attracted an enormous share of the spot light if fit. While Harlequins-Leinster represents an opportunity to delve back into Quins’ murky, pre-O’Shea dealing when they last collided, the back-to-back fixtures will be special for the 44-year old who, in another life, ran in Leinster’s first ever European try way back in 1995.
‘I scored all those years ago in Milan,’ he beams. ‘First try in Europe for Leinster and it has come a long way since hasn’t it? I was double jobbing those days, playing for Leinster and London Irish, flying back in and doing it because professionalism wasn’t really there. ‘It was just kicking in and it was incredible to think you were playing on a weekend (with London Irish) and then on a Wednesday flying out to Italy to play for Leinster. I remember after the match we were all given a £5 food voucher to get some food, which wouldn’t have stretched very far in Milan, even in those days But that was a great time.’
O’Shea was 24 when he arrived in London following the 1995 World Cup, a youngster with education on his mind. Remarkably, he’s still there in the English capital 19 years later.
‘It was just to study for a year, that’s all it was. There was no grand plan. Study for a year and do my masters between London and Alabama, which was a bit of a stretch over the summer.
‘I wanted to make that move into professionalism and thought a masters in sports management was perfect. Then it [rugby] went professional and London Irish gave me unbelievable opportunities for nearly a decade between playing, managing, managing director, various different roles, bottle washing.
‘It’s great to see that club in good hands again with the new people putting new impetus into it, but you never look and think in those sliding doors moments of what ifs. I’ve loved every second and I’m very settled. A lot of people think I live in Ireland the amount of times I’m back, but it will be very special coming back here to the Aviva.’
O’Shea insists he knows his way around the place, too, claiming his visits haven’t merely been confined to the TV studio, and he hopes the 2012 Premiership champions, ambushed in their own back- yard in the 2013 European quarter-finals by Munster, will be respected by everyone following their double date with Leinster.
There is pressure on getting results and there isn’t, he says in the same breath, nearly five full years into a post he revels in.
‘The owners are incredible and one of the reasons I took this on and left a good job in the Institute of Sport was they have a history of stability, always have, and a realism about what you are about and also a long-term plan.
ALL YOU want to do, as the years go on, is make sure you’ll leaveg the place as good as it could be and better than it has been. We have broken through in terms of being a team that wins trophies, but it doesn’t mean you win them every year, doesn’t mean you won’t have ups and downs.
‘Life, like sport, is a bit of a rollercoaster, but there is a group of people who have the belief that that is where we belong and the club is going in the right direction. We live and die by results but our players also know they can grow and will be backed – that is the important thing about this club,’ he explains, mak- ing light of his team’s inconsistencies this season.
Despite nearly two decades away, O’Shea, whose thirst for soaking up as many sporting nuances as possible took him to NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles last summer, has never-lost his Irish accent, nor his affinity for Leinster, either.
‘I’m still a Leinster fan,’ he admits openly. ‘It’s the province I grew up wanting to play for. You call it a club now... it wasn’t a club then (in the 1990s). I played for my club Lansdowne and my province, Leinster, but it’s now a real club feel.
‘The way they have played since Michael Cheika, Joe Schmidt and now Matt O’Connor, what they have done and what they have achieved is phenomenal and we’re just looking forward to it. We’ve got big-game players who want to play in matches like this and we’ll see either how good we are or how far we have to travel.
‘The double header is huge in this pool as both of us are unbeaten and it will be hotly contested. Leinster go in as favourites, as you’d expect, but we’re a proud team and when we have got all the parts together, we feel we can take on anyone.
‘Leinster’s style of play has excited so many people over the last few years and we just have to make sure we’re right on our game. Mentally, the players will have no issues as these are the sort of games that whet the appetite.’
They sure do, especially with memories of Bloodgate feeding into the build-up.