POWER RANGER
Tadhg Furlong is defined by raw strength in every facet of his game, including the ability to swat aside critics
SOMETIMES, it’s just about the push. Tadhg Furlong loves scrums. They are the basis of his rugby responsibilities, and he relishes the engagement. His conversation on the subject is flecked with mentions of angles, spidercams, leg position and binds.
The Six Nations has seen Furlong return to the form that made him the world’s best tighthead in 2017 and 2018 and, if he suffered as part of the calamitous slump of last year, his recovery provides Andy Farrell’s new Ireland with an outstanding foundation.
The scrum obsesses Furlong, a player who, despite his cult status and enormous physical presence, is more interested in technical preparation than blood-and-glory motivation.
But sometimes, the scrum nerd needs reminding that it’s about the push.
‘One hundred per cent,’ he candidly replies when asked if overthinking can be an issue.
‘It happens more than I would like it to happen. You go out and whatever you do, the three in the front row and the five in behind you all have to be on the same page.
‘You can overthink it a little bit too much about how we get those small angles. At the time, it is just about having a small bit of ignorance about you, and getting in and going forward.
Andy has been really good with that.’
Furlong’s scrummaging made an odd appearance in a Welsh press conference earlier in the week.
Ten days after they lost in Dublin, the Welsh forwards’ coach complained about Ireland’s technique in the match.
Furlong helped win a vital scrum penalty underneath the Irish posts with less than 10 minutes to play that sealed off the win.
‘We want to scrummage a certain way and paint really good pictures,’ said Jonathan Humphreys, in charge of the Wales forwards.
‘The consistency of that has been good, but when you’re dealing with tightheads like Furlong who is going to come right across the scrum from left to right, it creates problems and instability.’
‘I’ve just seen it,’ says Furlong when asked about the quote.
‘We try to push as square and straight as anyone. They said we were scrummaging from left to right, in the quote I’ve just seen, which would be very, very square scrummaging.
‘They probably could do with sorting out some of their stuff themselves, really, before looking at us,’ he says with a shrug.
‘Not Wales, but across the game, the trends are looseheads on big angles.
‘Look at overheads (camera angles from above). I know we didn’t have overheads of the game last weekend, but you see looseheads and you can’t see their shoulder; their neck is nearly on the hooker’s shoulder they are so far underneath, and as soon as any bit of weight comes on, the a*** swings out and they are pushing.
‘There probably was a bit of that in the Welsh game, we felt, but you just get on with it. You try to find a way to get the ball out.’
Whinging to the world is not Furlong’s way – ‘I wouldn’t be one for bringing it out in public, no’ – and in the three and a half years since his Test debut, taking in 43 Tests for Ireland and three for the Lions, his technique has discommoded many opponents but not many match officials.
However, his name was also mentioned in the England camp in recent days. Surprisingly, Eddie Jones did not seek to turn Furlong into a raging controversy, choosing diplomacy instead as part of a recent conciliatory tone pursued by the England coach (on this topic, at least).
‘The scrum is the place for the dark arts,’ said Jones.
‘What one person sees as right another sees as wrong. The Welsh are entitled to their opinion. We’ll formulate ours and let the referee decide on the verdict.’
And if that was not enough to be getting on with, the complaints from Wales also meant Furlong was a discussion point put to the English replacement hooker, Luke CowanDickie.
‘Tadhg Furlong is probably one of the best tightheads in the world at the moment. You could call it dark arts or cheating, but you just want to go forward.
‘Some tightheads get away with certain things, some looseheads get away with things: running around the corner, rolling in. Scrum-wise, we focus on ourselves and the speed of the engagement, and chase after the hit. If the coaches want to flag something up, they will.’
Outwardly, he showed no sign of irritation and perhaps Furlong is self-possessed enough to take his frequency in the conversations of opponents as evidence of his quality.
He became friendly with Mako Vunipola when touring with the Lions in 2017, and he doesn’t sugarcoat the loss of the brilliant loosehead to Eddie Jones’s team.
‘He is a quality, quality rugby player. He is never easy to scrum
‘YOU LOOK AT THAT GAME AND THINK HOW FAR OFF THE PACE WE WERE’
mage against, number one, and he is present around the field, what he offers in terms not only of ball-playing ability but gain-line advantage.
‘His footwork is exceptional for a prop. It’s very hard to get a decent two-man hit on him because he kind of weaves and dips. You have to respect his skill options.’
Furlong’s abilities in the loose have already yielded a try in this year’s championship, against the Welsh. He has also showed the depths of his fitness, playing 67 minutes in that match after going for 78 minutes against Scotland.
The latter was a consequence of an injury to the loosehead replacement Dave Kilcoyne, which meant Andrew Porter was brought on not to replace Furlong but on the other side of the scrum.
‘I was running out of fuel,’ he admits, smiling. ‘If my calves weren’t cramping, I wouldn’t have been too bad.
‘But I haven’t pushed on that many minutes for a good while. With Leinster it’s 55 minutes, 60 minutes.
‘You see Andrew Porter coming on, Cian Healy going off, and John Fogarty (the Ireland forwards’ coach) comes over and says, “Tadhg, you’re going to 80”. You have to do it.
‘It’s not the lungs that will get you, it’s the contact, that contact fitness that wears you down more than anything.
‘Sometimes you find international rugby is easier from a conditioning point of view to play than a Pro14 or European Cup game, because there tends to be fewer scrums in international rugby,’ he says.
‘It’s faster, there’s more running rather than scrum, lineout, maul.’
Last week brought a gap in the schedule, with Ireland duty confined to a two-day camp in Cork.
That allowed Furlong to spend time visiting his grandmother on Whiddy Island off west Cork.
With gentlemanly reserve, he is reluctant to reveal her age, but takes his phone out of his pocket to share a photo of her.
It was taken by his cousin’s girlfriend after the couple watched the Wales game with her.
‘That’s her there now, up watching the telly,’ he says proudly.
‘She got the two cataracts done up in Belfast. The quote of the day from my grandmother: ‘If Sexton misses this one I’ll curse him from all angles!
‘That’s a direct quote from the grandmother. She’s in fine fettle lads, she’s great craic.’
Her pride in a grandson that has proven himself world-class in the space of less than five seasons must be immense. There have been more good days than bad ones since Furlong emerged for province and country, with a European Cup and a Grand Slam the highlights.
The latter was secured at Twickenham on a remarkable day for Irish rugby. Snow was falling on west London as Ireland blazed through the home team. Furlong’s role in CJ Stander’s try provided
one of the lasting memories, taking a pass from Johnny Sexton, feinting to return it before spinning and popping the ball to Bundee Aki for a break.
It was the encapsulation of Furlong’s subtle skills but also Joe Schmidt’s Ireland: superbly coached, diligent and disciplined.
Schmidt’s last trip to Twickenham as the head of an Irish team was a far messier one.
Ireland were torn asunder in a World Cup warm-up game last August.
Afterwards, there was a scrambled attempt to explain away a 57-15 loss, that was, even in the circumstances, mortifying.
The visitors were at a different point in their tournament preparations, went the argument.
But it turned out that the defeat was just another blow in a miserable 2019 for the national team, preceded by last year’s Six Nations flop and followed by the World Cup collapse.
That Twickenham humiliation is the only point in the conversation that Furlong’s mood alters.
‘I don’t know, maybe we were naïve thinking the way we were (in terms of their readiness for the game),’ he says.
‘We thought we prepped really well. I thought we trained really well. It was the first game for a lot of us, obviously, and I think it was England’s third game, wasn’t it and the second one for a lot of them. We thought we’d go over and have a good chance to play.
‘We had some really good memories of the previous time we’d played in Twickenham. I remember stepping into the Richmond Hill, our hotel, thinking, “Jeez, the last time we were here and the craic we had, what a few days we had”.
‘Obviously it didn’t materialise,’ he says. ‘Obviously this week you’re looking back at some of your most recent games against England. You look at that game and you think, “Jeez, how far off the pace we were”.
‘Some of the stuff we were doing, just general energy and stuff, was just so, so poor.
‘You could make tonnes of excuses for it if you want but jeez, if we play like that at the weekend, it will be the same result.’
He eschews the opportunity to explain it all away as a matter of differing preparation schedules.
‘Sure it’s easy to make a thousand excuses for it if you want but by God, did it hurt.’
He looks hurt as he says that, too. This is one fierce competitor, at his best uncontainable.
Tadhg Furlong was a trending topic in Six Nations dialogue all week.
If that remains the case into the next one, then he will have re-established himself as the world’s best in his position.
And Twickenham will, once more, trigger happy memories.