Why Friday night in Naas is just as good as a Six Nations trip to Paris

The profile couldn’t have been higher, the calibre of player couldn’t have been better. The salary was the best I’ve ever had in my life. And I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t miss that environment, that on the eve of this year’s NatWest Six Nations Championship, that part of me didn’t wish I was still working in professional rugby.

And there is another part of me that remembers how I felt by the end of that 2008 season, when I left my position as Ireland’s head coach. There was an emptiness within, a void made vast and wide by a sense of regret that I had let people down: the fans, the IRFU, the players.

O’ Sullivan felt a sense of regret after a disappointing 2008 campaign

BILLY STICKLAND/INPHO

I hurt. For much of that spring and summer I reflected on the mistakes I made and the decisions I got wrong. I’d be lying if I didn’t think about the decisive turning points which went against us too: Shane Horgan being held up over the line against the Welsh, Brian O’Driscoll and Gordon D’Arcy being absent against England.

But something happened that September that made me feel solid again. I went to America, got involved in coaching camps in Denver, Tennessee, Chicago, San Francisco and started getting a thrill out of explaining to amateur players the benefits of doing things such as passing off their left hand and seeing them execute the move perfectly.

That whole trip was cathartic. In the weeks and months leading up to then, I felt a bit lost. My job had gone but the criticism hadn’t. My children were coming home from school upset at being told their dad was a rubbish coach.

And the burden got to me. As a parent you try to do your best for your children and yet here I was, the reason why they were being picked upon in the schoolyard. It wasn’t nice and I didn’t want them to have to go through anything like that again. Yet for the seven years leading up to then they had to.

I remember one of the definitive moments of my career, in Adelaide in the 2003 World Cup. We beat Argentina by a point, and an hour after the game, I took a walk by myself out into the middle of the pitch, because in those days getting a phone signal in a stadium was never too easy and the best place was often away from the grandstands.

I phoned home, asked how everyone was and then asked to speak to my son, who was 12 years old at the time. “You can’t,” my wife said. “He’s in bed with a migraine.”

And that was when it dawned on me that the career I’d chosen for myself wasn’t just defining my life. It was affecting everyone in the family.

If results went well, things were manageable. Yet when they didn’t, and when I was portrayed as a bad person as well as a bad coach, it was horrible for the kids. I worried for them and fell into a bad place for a while.

“Coaching has got me into this mood,” I remember thinking. And then coaching got me out of it. Work took me back to America and later to Biarritz. Now it is Old Belvedere. Ten years on from working with a golden generation of Irish players, I walk into a dressing room and see a different bunch of young men.

O’Driscoll missing the England game was a huge blow back in 2008

DAN SHERIDAN/INPHO

And yet even though it’s so incredibly different — there’s never a TV crew at our matches, never a press conference immediately afterwards, never a clamour for tickets — the feeling is remarkably similar.

One set of players were professional, the other amateur. One set could be seen on billboards, the other are juggling two separate lives, their rugby life and their professional one. This week, because our match in Naas was scheduled for last night, we switched training from Tuesday and Thursday to Monday and Wednesday.

“Sorry Eddie, I can’t make it,” one player said. “I’ve enrolled in a night course on Wednesdays. I chose that night because it wasn’t a training night.”

Others have separate commitments. Pre-season was interrupted by family holidays, Electric Picnic festival, work.

And yet when I leave home in Galway just after 3pm and reach our Anglesea Road training base at 5.15pm on a Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, it feels every bit as good as when the Ireland players arrived at the training camp the fortnight before a Six Nations.

People might doubt that. They’ll ask how anything can be the same as that pride you had in being national team coach. They’ll expect you to miss that buzz you had when you looked through your teamsheet and listed the names: O’Gara, D’Arcy, O’Driscoll, Horgan . . .

I won’t lie and pretend I wouldn’t like to be back there.

But being a professional coach is a bit like being an actor. If you’ve been in a bad movie, the phone might not ring. Where you end up is out of your hands and in the control of other people.

At this stage of my life — after 17 years or so as a head coach — I’m not looking to get back in there as a No 1. An assistant’s role, one where my job spec entails me getting out on the pitch, with the grass under my feet, is where you want to be.

That’s what I have here.

Coaching, I accept, is not the most important job in the world. Other professions are more valuable to society.

But it’s my passion. I’ve been doing it 36 years, back when I was a player, and that buzz I get from seeing something in my head and then verbalising that to a team, is as real now as it was back in 1982.

Sure, it’d be nice if I was getting a team ready for a Six Nations, European Champions Cup or Guinness Pro14 game. But it doesn’t have to be like that.

There was something magical about heading to Naas last night, something brilliant about seeing a group of players try to execute the plans you had for them. Rugby is a gift that keeps on giving to me. I’ll never tire of it.