The first time you see Mils Muliaina is on a massive advertisement at the bottom of the old Dublin Road, greeting you to Galway but also urging you to get yourself down to the Sportsground, where his image is inescapable.
Less visible and less recognisable but equally as important to Connacht is the bald, 40-something ex-prop, sitting in the foyer of a nearby hotel, browsing for NFL news on his laptop. As forwards coach, Dan McFarland’s job is ensuring that the likes of Muliaina and Bundee Aki have enough ball to play with in the first place. As it turns out, he’s pretty good at that job.
Last season, Connacht had the best defensive lineout in the Pro12 and the sixth-best in terms of winning their own ball. Only two sides were better at winning their own scrum ball, while no one scored as many tries off lineout mauls. All this, with only one international forward in the squad.
The performance of the forwards’ coach was acknowledged when McFarland was appointed to coach the Emerging Ireland team which won the IRB Nations Cup in Bucharest in June – his first experience as a head coach, unless you count Monivea in the Connacht Senior League. He relished that experience, especially for the opportunity it afforded to work closely with Joe Schmidt and Les Kiss.
But Connacht is what consumes him. And while he has built a reputation as a fine technician, it’s the passion for his job that strikes you most about McFarland.
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It has a lot to do with his length of service. Only Michael Swift, the veteran lock, and team manager Tim Allnutt have been here as long – all three arrived in the summer of 2000. McFarland played more than 100 games for the province and is now heading into his ninth year as an assistant coach.
All of which requires a fair dollop of resilience, because Connacht have lost more games than they’ve won in that time. That’s a lot of weeks of dealing with disappointment, but he’s good at that too.
“I love a fight, okay?” he says at one stage during our conversation. “To me, we have a fight every week. Every match is a fight, every single one, because there isn’t a team in professional rugby that has a smaller resource base than us. I don’t just mean financially, I mean in terms of the demographics. I love the uniqueness of that.
“This is a resilient place. One of the things that characterises the West of Ireland is quiet resilience. You’re not going to knock us down. We’re coming back at you. Doesn’t matter. Yes, we lost the game at the weekend but we’re still going to be there next weekend. We still want to win.”
This is delivered in an accent that is pure English public school — McFarland attended Ampleforth, along with Lawrence Dallaglio and the Easterby brothers. He’s adamant this doesn’t diminish his Connacht-ness, but does admit to being pleased that Thomas McFarland, a centre on the Galwegians under-15s, sounds like a local.
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McFarland enjoyed a privileged upbringing and knows that very few professional props studied Greek and Latin at university. But he doesn’t fit neatly into any stereotype. After university, he found employment as a special needs assistant in a tough inner-city school in Leeds, working with “certified psychopaths”. His grandfather, Danny McFarland, was a Belfast Catholic who played Gaelic football for Antrim.
He is also well-grounded in the cruel realities of professional sport. He was players’ rep at Richmond in the late 1990s when the club’s financial backer decided to pull the plug and the business was put into administration. For a season, he endured the eccentricities of Bernard Laporte and Max Guazzini at Stade Français. Two years after he joined Connacht, the IRFU announced that they couldn’t afford to keep the show on the road.
Journalists covering that story found the players’ shop steward articulate and well-researched, armed with an array of statistics which demonstrated why Connacht needed to preserved and nurtured.
Twelve years on, he finds that the questions coming from a different angle. Instead of just drip-feeding Connacht to maintain a pulse, the IRFU has given Pat Lam, the director of rugby, real money to spend, resulting in the arrival of Muliaina, Aki and Tom McCartney and making them the most extravagant recruiters of all the provinces.
This brings a new pressure, a new expectation. People are asking if Connacht can break new ground and finish seventh in the Pro12, maybe even sixth, which would mean qualification for the Champions Cup. McFarland is relentlessly positive but he’s realistic also.
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“Does this year feel different? I don’t think so,” he says. “Our objective is clear, to finish sixth and play in the top European competition, but we were half an hour away from beating Cardiff and finishing seventh last season, when we were crippled by injury.
“I’ll tell you why we can finish sixth: because our systems and our structures here are top-class. The collective identity here, the organisation, the coaching, the management as a whole, it’s right up there. They might not all be international names but the mixture of players is right because it’s been recruited properly, within the limitations of the resources that are there. So yes, we can finish sixth. But if we do, we’ll have done a bloody good job.”
If McFarland was in charge of spending, you imagine he’d probably have bought a lineout jumper to replace Craig Clarke, or a beast of a tighthead. Still, to his eyes, the arrival of a star like Muliaina shows that Connacht is perceived internationally as an efficient set-up, and one that has been enhanced by Lam’s presence.
While McFarland wants to be head coach at some stage in the future, this doesn’t prevent there being a warm relationship between the two men and their families.
But can Lam and McFarland, together with CEO Willie Ruane and the commercial team, turn Connacht into a going concern, one that turns a buck, rather than relying on handouts from Lansdowne Road? It’s generally reckoned that in order to be commercially viable, a professional rugby club needs to be attracting an average of around 10,000 punters to home games. Connacht aren’t even half way there. Typically, McFarland remains positive.
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“Can we get to 10,000 people a year? Potentially, yes, I think so,” McFarland says. “The Green Bay Packers sell their stadium out every week, 78,000 people out of the population of Green Bay which is something like 110,000. It’s based on a tradition of football there. There isn’t that tradition here but we’re going some way to building it.
“In 2000, I played in the Sportsground against Beziers, one of the top French clubs. It was a beautiful day but only about 300 people turned up. I couldn’t believe it. But I’ve been here when we played against Toulon in front of around 9,000, which shows the potential is there. You have to reach for your dreams.”