O’BRIEN STAYS TRUE TO HIS PROMISE
The assertion that he would never change copperfastened during recent Lions controversy, where he stood his ground despite the lack of support
SAM WARBURTON was never going to give Sean O’Brien’s Lions criticism his seal of approval on Friday night. Opting to do some TV punditry at the Scarlets-Bath Champions Cup match rather than follow his Cardiff team’s match in Toulouse, the tour Lions tour skipper came down firmly on Warren Gatland’s side when asked for his take on the Ireland flanker’s comments.
‘It’s not the first time it has happened post-Lions tour,’ said Warburton, winding up to defend his long-serving Wales national team coach who picked him to captain successive Lions tours (last summer’s in New Zealand and the previous escapade in Australia).
‘I guess when you get such a large group of players, it’s difficult to please everybody but the proof is in the pudding; 99.9 per cent of people thought the tour was a success and I thought it was handled and managed very well. It’s slightly disappointing [to hear criticism], but the majority of people on that tour really enjoyed it and thought it was a great success.’
Warburton’s utterances were typical of the way professional rugby is increasingly micromanaged. Players are more like robots these days. So much of what they say is bland. So much of what they do portrays a lack of personality.
Thank God, then, for a salt-of-theearth maverick like O’Brien telling it like it is without fear or favour and then sticking to his guns in an avalanche of rebuke.
Surely he’s entitled to his opinion that the Lions were over-trained heading into the first and third Test matches of the drawn three-game series against the All Blacks, and that Rob Howley, criticised separately this week by Lee Byrne for his style of Wales team coaching, was out of his depth as tour attack coach?
It should come as no surprise, though. Gatland, sacked as Ireland coach in 2001, has little tolerance of opinions emanating from these shores, especially if the views are contrary to his own.
O’Brien’s 2017 barb was up there with Brian O’Driscoll’s 2013 quip that the Kiwi wouldn’t be on his Christmas card list after he controversially dropped him in Australia.
Just as O’Driscoll did four years ago, O’Brien took the heat out of the situation by reaching out to Gatland over the phone last Monday in a conversation that apparently concluded with the flanker suggesting ‘I will see you in a couple of months for a pint’.
O’Brien, however, has stood firm on the comments he made on September 20 at Tullow RFC, reinforcing the notion that he has the backbone to go on and (someday) become an Ireland captain of note, perhaps even to Japan 2019. He would certainly travel as a man on a mission following his 2015 quarter-final suspension.
His willingness to voice his opinion and stand by it, unlike some of his contemporaries, is refreshing. Munster skipper Peter O’Mahony who was unceremoniously axed as Lions Test skipper for Warburton by Gatland following the series opener, baulked when asked his thoughts on O’Brien’s tour perspective at the Champions Cup launch.
Ireland and Ulster captain Rory Best, meanwhile, a midweek player on the trip who, unlike O’Brien, wasn’t gearing up to face the All Blacks on three consecutive Saturdays, opted not to lend his Irish Test colleague his support.
Perhaps the ageing Best was being politically-minded, fearing O’Brien as a long-term rival for the national team armband. What has been reassuring is that O’Brien, 31 next February, has remained true to himself and hasn’t run for cover.
Nearly six years ago, a month before his 26th birthday, he insisted in these pages he would never change who he is, words that still ring true today. ‘It’s a thing I’ve always said, I want to stay the way I am… you don’t forget where you’re from, what you’re all about and what your values are.’
If O’Brien, centrally contracted by the IRFU through to November 2019, felt awkward about the Lions fallout, he wouldn’t be putting himself about so visibly in the public eye. This past week alone he attended (and was a winner at) a sporting clay shoot in Bagenalstown last Sunday, was one of the main speakers at Tuesday’s One-Zero sports conference at Croke Park and then, unlike the sidelined Warburton who turned a blind eye to his club’s fortunes, travelled over to Glasgow on Friday to help Leinster in whatever way he could to prepare for a European game even though he still wasn’t fit enough to be part of the match-day 23 for yesterday’s win. It’s an earthiness that demands he is listened to about the Lions, not ridiculed as a nuisance who should have bitten his lip.
I want to stay as I am... you don’t forget where you’re from