IT WAS BACK IN 2016 when Gavin Thornbury took a gamble. He was in the Leinster Academy but stuck at the back of a lengthy queue. Thornbury is a Dub and product of Blackrock College. You could say that about a fair few players at Leinster.
Kurt McQuilkin was still on the Leinster coaching staff when he approached Thornbury with an offer. Try something different, he said. You can see why. James Ryan was coming through; Devin Toner was still in his prime; Ross Molony was a rising star; Mick Kearney and Hayden Triggs respected pros.
Thornbury was 23. It was three years since he joined the Leinster academy and injuries as well as competition had halted his progression. If something was going to happen in his career then he needed to try something new.
That was the advice McQuilkin gave him.
The former Ireland international has a contacts book thicker than the Old Testament. Border, a club on New Zealand’s North Island, had a shortage in the position where Leinster had a surplus.
They called, Thornbury answered, helping the club win the Wanganui club championship – the equivalent of a county championship in GAA language. His performances for Border led to another call, this one from Wanganui – which, to continue the GAA analogy, is the equivalent of playing inter-county football in a provincial championship.
By October Thornbury had won again, claiming a Meads Cup medal, a treasured prize in New Zealand rugby. Six months, 23 games, two trophies, he left Ireland untested and came back a different person.
“It was probably one of the highlights of my life, those six months,” the Connacht and now Ireland A player said yesterday. “The experience really stood to me because playing in New Zealand is something not many Irish players get the chance to do.
“It was a completely different experience. I was very much a city head and you’re going to a place where a lot of the players you’re playing with are sheep farmers. It certainly opened up my eyes.
“I was working full-time as a roofer for three-and-a-half months and then in a meat works for six weeks. It was something I had never done and was completely outside of my comfort zone.”
Not just in terms of getting his hands dirty in the workplace but also in terms of fending for himself, being away from home comforts, travelling to a new country by himself, living on his wits, learning about the real world.
“I hadn’t done the whole work thing and it was a really good experience for me,” he says. “Rugby was probably only the side part of it. It kind of opened up my eyes to everything, life really. It was an incredible experience and kind of made me who I am today.”
If factory work toughened him emotionally, the rugby – 23 games for club and province – hardened him physically. “You’re playing with Fijians, Samoans, there’s such a mixed bag of people down there. They’d throw massive offloads. It’s just a different way of playing and you’re dealing with some massive characters.
“That’s probably the biggest thing that I loved doing, the fact it wasn’t very structured, if you saw something was on, you called it, you played it. They tried pretty much everything down there. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. It was just completely different to what I had played since I had started in school.”
By Christmas the adventure was over and he was back home, a different person, more appreciative of what he had, more inclined to fight harder for what he wanted.
By April the following year, when it was obvious he wasn’t going to journey through the bottleneck at Leinster, he was signing for Connacht, the journey to Galway seeming a lot less daunting than one to New Zealand.
“I didn’t think I’d get that second chance to play professional rugby, so when I got it I just appreciated it even more, you realise how privileged you are to do it. So it was more the outlook which stuck with me more than anything.”
The rest of the journey, breaking into the Connacht team, becoming a mainstay in their second row, doing so well in the 2020/21 season that he got named on the Pro14 dream team, well, that’s the kind of story you’re always reading.
Even the low points – an injury which pretty much wiped out last season for him – is not untypical in the modern game.
But taking a semester off a Commerce Degree to chance your arm in New Zealand club rugby, slaving away in a meat factory, that storyline is more Rocky Balboa than Ross O’Carroll-Kelly.
So you can see why he’s buzzing at the prospect of playing for Ireland A against a New Zealand XV tomorrow, at working with Paul O’Connell, at learning a new lineout system, swotting up on the international side’s phase plays, all the while knowing this week’s ‘dream’ is so much better than the ‘dark place’ he was in last year when injury struck.
“Facing New Zealand after being there six years ago,” Thornbury said, “it feels like it has come full circle for me.”