Evergreen Rob Kearney still shining in a golden age
Full back embodies the success of IRFU’s player welfare system
GIVEN all he has achieved in his career, it seems churlish that this remains one of the lingering memories of Rob Kearney’s Ireland service. It is a perishing London afternoon in 2008, two days before St Patrick’s Day. England have just battered Ireland in what will be Eddie O’Sullivan’s last match as coach of his country.
Kearney is 22 years of age, winning his sixth cap, and around him a generation is crumbling. A dismal Six Nations has ended in predicted misery against the English, and O’Sullivan’s fate is widely anticipated.
On occasions such as this one, it is useful to hear the views of senior players, and there were a lot of them in that side, men who 12 months later would be celebrated as Grand Slam champions.
At this time, though, and in this place, on the balcony of a gym in a room under a stand in Twickenham, they are nowhere to be seen.
Instead, it is Kearney who is presented to the media, expected to try and put some sense on a display that would have grave implications.
And if he can’t speak with the authority of a seasoned pro, if he can only offer the perspective of a young man with little in the way of Test rugby experience, at least he tries. That memory has always stuck. If there are no hiding places on a Test rugby pitch, the full-back’s role is especially exposed. Their duties combine anticipation, speed and bravery, and mis-reads or dropped catches can come with disastrous consequences for their team.
Nerve is not the least of the qualities required, and Kearney has never been a shirker.
He did not go missing that afternoon in Twickenham 10 years ago and he has spent the decade since showing up for his country.
In that time, he has won 87 caps on the way to becoming the most decorated player in Irish rugby history.
Only Kearney and Rory Best are two-time Grand Slam winners, present for the victories in 2009 and again last March.
But Kearney has excelled with his province as well as with Ireland, his haul of four European Cups with Leinster leaving him out on his own as the game’s biggest winner in this country.
There were three Lions caps, too, as well as four league titles with his province.
As remarkable as his success has been his endurance, and it is this that makes Kearney one of the incontestable triumphs of Irish rugby’s golden age.
The success of the IRFU player welfare scheme is repeated so often, it could soon be lost to cliché. But it has been central to every joyful day brought to the country by the national team for two decades.
It has also benefitted the provinces, as players like Best, Kearney and Johnny Sexton continue their careers deep into their 30s.
And this is in a time when the vulnerability of players to serious and even life-changing injuries has never been as apparent.
Of the veterans Joe Schmidt will seek to nurture towards one final tilt at glory in Japan next year, none has survived the trials of Kearney.
Where Best and Sexton have both struggled with injuries on occasion, Kearney has contended not only with fitness difficulties but also the competition for his place brought by younger men.
Keith Earls and Simon Zebo were both hailed as the future of Irish full-back play, attackers said to offer a more sophisticated style than Kearney’s game could muster.
Then on St Stephen’s Day last year, Jordan Larmour scored a remarkable try from full back for Leinster against Munster in Thomond Park.
It signalled the arrival of perhaps the most exciting talent in a generation. And his footwork and speed looked like existential threats to the career of Kearney.
Come the Six Nations, though, Kearney was there in the No 15 shirt. Of a possible 400 minutes in Ireland’s Grand Slam run, he played 395.
He does not score freely, with the last of his 13 Test tries coming in the World Cup pool win over France in 2015.
But in a system where Schmidt is maximising the resources available to him, Kearney’s role is critical.
In providing reliability under high balls and unerring judgement in reading opposition attacking intentions, he offers as close to certainty as a coach could find.
This is the 13th season he has been doing so, since a debut on tour to Argentina in June 2007.
In Rob Kearney, the triumphs of this age of wonder for Irish rugby are personified.
Kearney thrives as the system does.