There’s a scene in Eddie O’Sullivan’s just-published autobiography Never Die Wondering which perfectly illustrates the precarious existence of the professional sports coach. It’s late one night in April and O’Sullivan is sitting alone in his one-room apartment in Boulder, Colorado, surfing the net for speculation on Ian McGeechan’s Lions squad, due to be announced the following day.
“I will admit to a wistful thought that it could have been me striding into that Heathrow hotel to announce my selection,” he writes. “Instead, I faced the more mundane business of haggling over the price of a rucking net and seeing if, perhaps, I could book a meeting room in Charleston free of charge.”
How are the mighty fallen. When he returns to the US next month, O’Sullivan will be preparing coaches for an ‘A’ team tournament involving Canada, Argentina and the Eagles. That’s ‘A’ for anonymous. The highlight of the season is the back-to-back, do-or-die World Cup qualifiers against Uruguay in Montevideo and a venue yet to be decided. Should the Eagles qualify, they’ll end up in the same pool as Ireland. “Someone up there is having a joke at my expense,” O’Sullivan quipped this week.
Is he bitter about the chain of events that brought him to this? He can’t afford to be. “Here’s a thing,” he says. “The next thing I was in the office, and took a call from Tom McGurk on the radio about the Lions selection and the number of Irish guys who’d been picked. I was delighted. Now I’d love to have been in Ian McGeechan’s shoes, and I think I would have done a pretty good job. But I wasn’t him. I had another job on my hands. I got on with it. Spend too much time looking in the rear-view mirror and you are going to crash.”
That said, he’s spent much of the past year looking back. Random House first approached O’Sullivan’s agent just before the ill-fated 2007 World Cup and, somewhat surprisingly, they were still interested in doing the book after everything fell so disastrously apart. It could be argued that O’Sullivan’s story looks out of date on the shelves beside accounts of Ireland’s Grand Slam. Don’t buy that argument, though. This is a book worth reading.
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To discount this 50-year-old as yesterday’s man is to discount the single-most influential figure in Irish rugby over what has been a truly momentous decade. And as someone who has been involved in the sport for 30-odd years, his story serves as a fascinating insight into the revolution that has taken place during that period.
O’Sullivan has quite a bit to get off his chest so it’s just as well he has a ghost writer in Vincent Hogan who is capable of capturing both his voice and his sharp sense of humour — despite reports, he does have one.
It doesn’t make itself apparent for a few chapters, admittedly. For O’Sullivan goes in on the subject of the World Cup and the backlash that followed. “We were on our knees emotionally,” he writes, “and the general instinct seemed to be to give us a good kicking now. You could detect a palpable sense of delight in some quarters that things had gone so badly wrong.”
His antipathy towards certain sections of the media is a recurring theme, and hardly surprising given his depiction as a megalomaniac. O’Sullivan recalls watching the TV at home in Moylough and how his 19-year-old daughter Katie was upset to hear George Hook liken her dad to Mussolini or “the Fuhrer in his bunker”.
So part of the reason behind writing the book was to dispel myths about his persona, to reveal the man behind the pantomime villain. We learn that he played the part of Yum Yum, the leading lady in Youghal CBS’s production of The Mikado — the words of “Three Little Maids From School Are We” are embedded into his hard drive, he says. That the two teenage years in a Christian Brothers ‘house of formation’ in Dun Laoghaire became a “draconian” existence where he “tried to remain stoic in public.” That he was “overcome with emotion” for around 30 seconds after Ireland beat Australia in 2002 at the thought of how proud his late mother would have been.
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O’Sullivan reveals that he risked life and limb night-fishing for salmon off the coast of Youghal during his teens — an experience that inspired his fascination for the theme of endurance — and that he once worked as a roadie and played bodhran for a trad group on a tour of Asia and America.
The various yarns lend him a humanity rarely seen by the public. At the same time, part of his humanity is that he can be, well, difficult. Viewed from a different angle, his story is a succession of conflicts.
Naturally, a fair amount of space is devoted to his troubled relationship with Hook — “To say that George Hook and I go back a long way is a bit like observing that Israel and Gaza have a history,” he writes. Then there are the disputes with Galwegians, Connacht, Declan Kidney, Jake White, Marcelo Loffreda, Liam Hennessy and Phil Larder, with whom he almost came to blows during the 2005 Lions tour. There was even a coolness with Sister Dympna at the Holy Rosary College in Mountbellew, where O’Sullivan taught maths and PE.
O’Sullivan charges McGeechan with “posturing” for the position of 2009 Lions coach while acting as Clive Woodward’s assistant in New Zealand. Perhaps the most unequivocally damning material, however, concerns Warren Gatland. O’Sullivan delivers a withering assessment of Gatland’s failings during the two years they worked together.
He is presented as a poor time-keeper who turns up for training sessions that were often “shambolic” with “a few notes scribbled on a piece of paper”. Gatland also enjoyed the adulation of his supporters rather too much for O’Sullivan’s liking. After the victory in Paris in 2000, there is an image of Gatland at the top of the stairs in Kitty O’Shea’s pub, “waving to the crowd like the Pope in St Peter’s Square.”
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O’Sullivan has never been one for crowds. He admits to seeing himself initially an outsider. Given the trust invested in him for so long by the IRFU, it’s strange to think that in his early days as a development officer, he had such an uneasy relationship with his employers.
The thing that has rubbed so many people up the wrong way is that he can be painfully direct — which is also what makes his book readable. No wonder the Americans take to him so readily. Of the Irish, he writes, “We communicate in nuance rather than word. We shy away from being direct for fear the other person will take umbrage.”
He admits there were times when he was too direct — he mentions three separate occasions when he delivered post-match dressing room bollockings that were inappropriate. But in general, he makes no apology for speaking his mind.
Only this week, he responded strongly to the views of Paul O’Connell, Jerry Flannery and Denis Leamy, printed here last Sunday, calling his game-plans into serious question — in a nutshell, these Munster forwards felt that under O’Sullivan’s wide-wide game-plan, they weren’t allowed dominate opposing packs like Munster forwards should.
“The logic that Ireland should play like Munster is flawed,” he says. “In the Heineken Cup, Munster have a Test pack against a club pack. It’s not the same with Ireland. If we went toe-to-toe with every team we met in my six-and-a-half years, we wouldn’t have won as many Tests. I always thought we had to have different game-plans for different opponents. Like, we used to play the Munster way against Wales, pummel the crap out of them. So it’s selective memory on their part.”
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He says he is on good terms with all of the players that passed through his hands in those six-and-a-half years — quite a few of them attended the book launch in Dublin last Thursday, including Brian O’Driscoll, Shane Horgan, Denis Hickie, Frankie Sheahan and Reggie Corrigan. The book is littered with photos of smiling players and coaches, as if to reinforce the point that Camp Ireland under Eddie was not quite the dreary, regimented existence it was made out to be.
So what was the difference last season? Certainly, Kidney seems to be a better delegator, and to have a better understanding of needs. He also created more competition for places — O’Sullivan admits he would never have dreamt of changing a team that had played three, won three.
But none of these things made the difference when Wayne Barnes was the only man in the Millennium Stadium who spotted O’Driscoll brushing the ball against the try-line, or when Stephen Jones was a metre-and-a-half short with that kick. And if either of those marginal calls had gone the other way, we’d have been looking at another second-placed finish — and O’Sullivan had four of those in seven years.
Happily, he is gracious enough to omit this, just as Kidney was gracious enough to mention the contributions of O’Sullivan and Niall O’Donovan on the day Ireland won the Slam, showing, as O’Sullivan described it, “an immense dignity in his finest hour”.
And the future? He finds it hard to envisage a time when he won’t be earning a living as a rugby coach. “Doing the book was cathartic,” he said last week. “It just puts things in context. But I never want to find myself in a place in my life where I’m looking back and thinking about the good old days. I think when you start that, you’re going to give up on doing anything else. Maybe the next part isn’t worth writing about but as long as I’m happy, that’s alright.”
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• Never Die Wondering: The Autobiography by Eddie O’Sullivan (Random House, pub Sept 3)
Seconds out, it’s the Eddie v George showdown
Stung by comments in Eddie O’Sullivan’s book, RTE pundit George Hook has thrown down the gauntlet to the former Ireland coach to come on his Newstalk radio show on Thursday and Eddie has accepted. ‘Sparks will fly,’ promises George and it is easy to see why. Hook liked to mock O'Sullivan for his refusal to admit to mistakes, saying he was ‘the Edith Piaf of rugby’. O’Sullivan responded in his recently published book: ‘To say that George Hook and I go back a along way is a bit like observing that Israel and Gaza have a history . . . He has made his name on a booming mix of metaphor and analysis that often strays into the land of ridicule. Good luck to him . . . It wasn’t George’s criticism I had difficulty with. It was the tone I found offensive. In my opinion George thinks nothing of ridiculing someone in his role as a media pundit and I simply cannot respect that.’ Bring it on!