‘I had two roles … telling jokes on the bus and IT support!’
Mike Ross is modest about his time with Ireland but his legacy is felt in the progress of Tadhg Furlong and Andrew Porter
IN the summer of 2017, Joe Schmidt took a young Ireland squad to the US and Japan for a development tour. Eleven frontliners – including a young Tadhg Furlong – were away in New Zealand on Lions duty. Meanwhile, Schmidt was looking to blood the next generation of talent coming through the system, including Andrew Porter. It was a successful three weeks. It was enjoyable as well. Of all the expeditions under Schmidt, it was the most relaxed. A point emphasised during a night on the Tokyo leg of the trip.
A large portion of the squad were keen to take in a baseball match in town and the small group of journalists on tour were invited along. An enjoyable night for the media hit a bit of a snag when their taxi failed to appear after the game. No worries, as the group of hacks were invited to take a lift back with the players and management.
Never failing to spot an opportunity, Schmidt insisted that the new arrivals on the team coach should observe a long-held tradition: first time on the bus, sing a song. All credit to Joe, he must have revelled in seeing a group of mortified reporters having to serenade the Ireland squad with some impromptu karaoke as the bus weaved its way through the streets of Tokyo.
Mike Ross knows all about the pressure of the team bus. Ross had hung up his boots a few months previously, but the former Leinster and Ireland prop’s legacy had continued to live on. Allegedly, one of the Corkman’s party pieces was telling jokes at the top of the bus during his playing days.
‘Yeah, it would not have been suitable for family consumption, let’s put it that way,’ Ross, now 41, explains.
‘I had two roles in the team. One was bus jokes and the second one was IT support. Those were two things I did. If someone had a problem with a computer or a phone, I’d fix it.
‘When you go on tours you have to amuse yourself somehow and usually there’ll be one guy in charge of music. There’ll be another guy in charge of local knowledge so every time we arrive in a new city one fella had to stand up and tell us about the city’s stats, good places to go.
‘You’d have another guy in charge of the entertainment committee, organising the down-day activity, so you might go play golf or go into the city to do some shopping or you might go to an amusement park or something like that.
‘The guys decided that every bus journey and I’d get up and tell a joke.’
Apparently, the combination of the former tighthead prop’s deadpan delivery and the utter inappropriateness of the content would have teammates in floods.
‘Sometimes I’d rip off some Billy Connolly jokes… there’s more bleak ones. The sicker the better. It’s not something you’d probably do in the corporate world, let’s put it like that.’
All joking aside, Ross was an important cog in hugely successful Leinster and Ireland squads for many years.
A late bloomer who missed out on an academy place and left his native Munster to seek pastures new, Ross only turned professional at age 26 after Dean Richards offered him a lifeline with Harlequins. He certainly made up for lost time once he returned to Ireland in 2009.
He would make 152 appearances for Leinster, win 61 Ireland caps, two Six Nations titles, two Heineken Cups, one European Challenge Cup and a brace of Pro12 titles. He also anchored the scrum at two World Cups in 2011 and 2015. Not a bad innings at all.
John Hayes had almost singlehandedly held up the Irish scrum for the best part of a decade but Ross arrived in time to take up the mantle. More importantly, he laid the foundations for Furlong and Porter to flourish as international tightheads.
A few weeks ago, both were named in Warren Galtand’s Lions squad to tour South Africa this summer. Two Irish tightheads selected to take on the Springboks.
Quite the turnaround from the days when coaches would be saying novenas to ensure the health of Hayes or Ross in the lead-up to big Test weeks.
Porter’s Lions dream was recently shattered by a foot injury. A cruel blow for a 24-year-old who made the transition from loosehead to the other side of the scrum barely four years ago. He got a text from his old mentor.
‘I touched base with him to say, “look man I’m sorry, tough luck but I guess you can take pride in the fact that you got selected but I don’t know if that will help you now”,’ Ross recalls.
‘The poor fella has to look at a couple of bags of Lions kit that he picked up a couple of weeks ago. It’s a silly thing. It was kind of a dead rubber game (against Glasgow) he was playing in but at the same time you want to play to keep your fitness up. So, it was just innocuous. I think he just planted his foot and heard something crunch. Unfortunately, that was that.
‘It’s a cruel one but he’s still quite young. He could have another two Lions tours in him. You just don’t know.’
Porter and Furlong have often spoken about the scrummaging apprenticeship they received from Ross in their formative years. The likes of former scrum coach Greg Feek and his successor John Fogarty were massive influences but Ross provided priceless guidance on the training pitch and in the analysis room.
You’d wonder how many old heads in other set-ups would have done the same for greenhorn rivals coming through the ranks? ‘I mean… like, if I had been in my late 20s, maybe I wouldn’t have been as nice!’ Ross admits with a laugh.
‘At the same, it’s good for the squad and it’s good for performance levels if you’re helping and you’re being pushed. I said this before but say we’re playing a final and I’m starting and Tadhg is one the bench. Let’s say I go down after five minutes and because Tadhg has not been sufficiently prepped, he gets tossed around a bit and we lose the game and then I don’t get a medal. ‘So, what is that? It’s a squad game and you’d need everyone is the squad to be as well prepared as you can be because it’s a squad effort. If you don’t have the quality in the squad challenging you and pushing you then your performance isn’t going to rise to the sufficient levels required that it take to win Heineken Cups, to win Six Nations.’
Ross still regards his omission from the 2013 Lions squad as a major low point in his career. Gatland would opt for Adam Jones, Dan Cole and Matt Stevens as his three tightheads to tour Australia. Ross had been the cornerstone of the Leinster and Ireland packs, but a tough year for the national team seemingly cost him a chance to fill the red jersey. ‘It was probably my greatest disappointment missing out on that 2013 tour.
‘Sometimes there’s a bit of luck here because I think if it (the tour) was in 2011 or 2012 I would probably go because Leinster are winning. In 2014, 2015 we’re Six Nations championships but 2013 was just like one of those years where nothing really went right.
‘So you need a bit of luck to get picked sometimes, too. We got beaten by Italy that year. We had just missed out on picking up the wooden spoon. Leinster, we still won the Challenge Cup but we didn’t win the European Cup that year. I had a couple of niggles so I probably didn’t do as much as I needed to.
‘Sometimes it’s just timing. Right time and right place with the right run of form. Would anyone have picked Jack Conan on the Lions tour this time last year?
‘So Jack timed his run of form correctly and he’s the right man to go on tour. Sometimes you just need to time it well and sometimes your timing is a bit off.’
These days, Ross is working as a sales director with Amdocs, a telecommunications giant which employs 25,000 people worldwide. He still dabbles in some coaching. Ross has helped out with Malahide in the past and is still working with UCD and Old Belvedere. In recent
‘IT’S CRUEL BUT ANDREW WILL HOPEFULLY STILL MAKE TWO LIONS TOURS’
‘IT’S GOOD FOR THE SQUAD IF YOUR’E HELPING AND BEING PUSHED’
years he worked as a scrum coach with the Ireland women’s team.
He has also been coaching underage rugby down at Bective Rangers. His son Kevin looks to be fitting the mould as a future tighthead prop as well.
‘He’s built like his paternal grandfather. So, he’s got a big chest and short legs so I think he might be a prop. He thinks he’s going to be a kicker but I don’t know how to break it to him that maybe genetically you have been given those particular gifts.’
Having played under one of the greatest coaching minds to ever set foot on this island, it’s no surprise to hear that Ross has borrowed plenty of Schmidt’s coaching philosophies. The pair were once neighbours when the Kiwi used to live in Dublin and remain good friends to this day. The young fellas at Bective are getting some world-class coaching by the sounds of it.
‘I mean they’re kids so you have to adjust your standards but I use the same phrasing and terminology explaining what I want them to do.
‘I say, if I want two guys going into the ruck I’d say “left barrel, right barrel”. Two bullets to the ruck and make sure you take the man with you. That kind of way.
‘When you’re tackling a guy, don’t stop, aim behind them, that’s where you want to go. You don’t want to stop at him, go through him. Stuff like that.’
This summer, Ross and his son will have their feet up watching Furlong and the rest of the Lions in action. His last tour of duty was in South Africa back in 2016. His last Test was against the Boks in Port Elizabeth. Furlong made his first start the previous week in the rarefied air of Johannesburg.
The memories of playing at altitude
remain vivid.
‘It’s horrible,’ says Ross. ‘Because I wasn’t playing in that game. I had to do fitness. It was like breathing through a f ****** g straw. it was horrible. You felt like you couldn’t get your breath. I reckon if that game was at sea level, we would have won the series hands down.
‘The other thing which happened when I was away in South Africa was both my kids got chicken pox so my missus was like a wasp! I was sending her pictures of me jumping into shark tanks. “I’m on a helicopter ride here honey, we’re going over wine country, how are you?” My daughter looked like she’d been carpet bombed by a B52 carrying chicken pox.
‘Ah sure… I was getting battered by South Africans for three weeks.’
Always thinking ahead, Ross smoothed things over before he landed back in Dublin.
‘CJ (Stander) had a buddy who did custom jewellery so I got her a nice amethyst ring so she was happy enough!’
Good memories and a strong legacy as, in Furlong and Porter, Ireland continue to benefit from Ross’s contribution to the cause.