EVERY NOW AND then, Eddie Hughes will stroll out from the clubhouse at Thomond RFC and catch sight of a familiar figure leaning against a wall, keeping an eye on the action out on the pitch. Even with the hood pulled up, Keith Earls struggles to keep a low profile at his home club.
“He never gets away with that for too long,” explains Hughes. “Soon he’d be surrounded.”
Thomond has never had a hero quite like Earls, and as the love and well-wishes have poured in for the Limerick native on the back of his retirement from rugby, the overwhelming feeling in his home patch is one of pride.
Earls debuted for Ireland in 2009 and remains the last player from Thomond to be capped at Test level. His retirement signals the end of one of the most important and inspirational playing career Irish rugby has ever seen.
Hughes, a coach and former president of Thomond, goes a long way back with the Earls clan, having played with Keith’s father, Ger.
“My first memories of Keith would be him coming to matches with his family. A very quiet kid, and that didn’t change much when he started playing, but his Dad was similar. Very quiet, and even shy I’d say.”
It’s hard to envision now, but in his early years Earls found himself playing in the pack, following in his Dad’s footsteps by lining out in the backrow. When Hughes started coaching at Thomond, one of the first big decisions was to move the youngster into the backline. It soon become evident the club had a special talent on their hands.
“We immediately moved him from 8 to 13 and even at such a young age, the whole strategy changed,” Hughes says.
The calls were just to get the ball into his hands as early as possible. His rugby prowess, you could just see from the start that he was something special.
“As the games went on, he showed a lot of good leadership skills, all through his displays on the pitch. He might have a quiet word with lads, but it was more he’d be excellent on the field and that dripped down to other players and they really looked up to him. But he’d nearly be apologetic for playing so well, he was that shy.”
Former Garryowen player and coach Conan Doyle can still picture the first time he encountered Earls.
“A Munster schools trial,” Doyle recalls. “I think I was in sixth year and Keith was a couple of years younger than me. I didn’t know him then, he hit me in a tackle and it was probably the hardest I’d ever been hit. He was a tough young fella, I’d give him that!”
A few years down the line the two would become teammates through the Munster underage system before linking up again when Earls came to play AIL rugby at Garryowen. At that stage, he was one of the hottest prospects in Irish rugby.
“He had a good humble head on him and certainly never came across as a guy who was too far ahead of himself, even though he was an exceptional young player, and that’s not an easy thing to do. To be that exceptional as a young player in Limerick – and Limerick rugby was big at the time – there would have been plenty of buzz around the place, but he always had his head switched on, and I assumed that was to get himself into the professional game and be as good as he could be.”
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“We feel that if you start talking about Munster and Ireland with kids, it probably puts undue pressure on them,” says Hughes, “but you could see he was a special player, and that was recognised universally.
“For example, he would have been the envy of the schools system and it was eventually a coach very close to Keith’s heart, John Broderick out in St Munchin’s College, that got him into that system. You dare to dream, so to speak, but we always felt that if anyone was going to make it to the elite level, it was going to be Keith.
“Everybody can reflect on how fast Keith was, how he’d take off when he got the ball and his evasive skills, but the drive he had was what people didn’t see. He has a tremendous work ethic. When his close friends started to go to parties and things, Keith would have a glass of orange. He’d be working on other things (outside of training), he’d be in the pool, he’d be doing sprints.
So when he first pulled on that Munster jersey, people could see how good he was but nobody saw that drive and that work ethic beforehand. It was unparalleled to anything I had ever seen, in any kid, in any sport.”
Before he broke through at Munster, Earls lit up the AIL for a single, memorable season. At the age of 19, Earls swapped Thomond for Garryowen and helped steer the defending champions back to the AIL final, where they lost out to Cork Con.
“I had come across Keith again the year before in the Munster system, playing Munster A games with him, and he was always the standout player in those A games,” says Doyle.
“So we were delighted for him to be coming over to Garryowen. That season, 2007/08, he played most of the games with us and we went well, got to the final with Keith playing 13 or wing, mixing in and out of the two positions all year.
“I was playing at 12 and to have a guy like Keith, he was such a dangerous fella on the ball. You knew if you got him the ball in space, especially when he was on the wing, it was likely going to end up in a try. He was such a fast, strong young player. He could beat guys easily, so it was great to have that confidence in a backline that if you get the ball out to him, you’re fairly confident he’s going to score.
“And he was such a strong defender for a young guy, and that was at a time when it was quite hard for young guys to break into AIL teams. There wasn’t too many guys at Keith’s age starting regularly on Division 1 AIL teams.
“He was only 19 or 20, but was arguably one of the strongest attackers in the league, even at that stage. He was an exceptionally dangerous attacker, beating guys for fun. If he got a one-on-one he was pretty much scoring every single time. He was so hard to defend against, so quick and so strong.
“I remember that in the AIL semi-finals, we beat a good Shannon team out in Coonagh, so a local Limerick derby, but we beat them by 20-odd points. He was excellent that day. There was a big crowd at the game, and obviously it was a big thing for a young guy to look so good in a game like that.”
It helped that Earls was ripping it up on the pitch, but off it, he managed to quickly endear himself to his new teammates.
“Everybody warmed to him. He was quiet, but had a bit of craic and had a bit of fun with the lads. He was a great guy to have around the place.
“But he also had that professional mindset, that stood out in him. He had his head switched on to becoming a professional, and you could see that in him, helped by his father, who was quite involved with him.
“At that time, the (provincial) Academies were still quite new. They were only going about three or four years at that stage, but he definitely had the mindset of an older (more experienced) player with regards to what he needed to do to be a professional, in terms of how you need to look after yourself off the field.
“I was not in any way surprised to see how successful he’s been.”
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4 February, 2011 – At Ireland’s captain’s run ahead of their Six Nations opener against Italy, the photographers fix their lenses on the bright green boots being sported by a 23-year-old Earls. It’s only when they zoom in that the inscription on the heel becomes legible: Moyross. A year earlier, the snappers caught him spelling out Moyross with his boots on a snow covered training pitch.
Limerick doesn’t exactly suffer from a shortage of sporting heroes, especially since John Kiely turned the county into the dominant force in hurling, but Earls holds a special place in the heart of Limerick sports fans. Here was a guy who came from outside the traditional rugby pathways and made it to the very top. And at a time when Moyross had a particularly bad rep, Earls was going out of his way to remind the world exactly where he was from.
For that alone, he’ll always be an icon at Thomond.
“Thomond and where we’re from, it’s a pretty unique area,” says Hughes.
“It can be considered a bit of a school of hard knocks or the wrong side of the tracks, or a regeneration area, but what Thomond has always done was present opportunities to kids in these areas. That’s always been the focus of the club, and for Keith to come in and progress through a club like Thomond and show all the kids that those pathways do exist in clubs like Thomond and you can excel and play at the very pinnacle of rugby globally . . .
“Like, when he stitched Moyross into his boots or when he references Thomond on his 100th cap, that he’s the first player from Thomond to get to that and he’d like to see another player do it . . . He’s so proud of Thomond and where he’s from. I watched him captain Ireland in New Zealand last year with my eight-year-old, Keith referenced the last team he captained being Thomond U14s, and my kid went bananas on the couch! He couldn’t believe it.
Everyone says he inspires children in Thomond, but I think it’s far greater than that. For me, Keith has shown kids in an area that lacks opportunities that if you dream big enough, those dreams can come true.
“For such a young man, his legacy at Thomond is that he’s given every child the encouragement to dream, and to dream big. He followed his dreams, and he worked hard and achieved it. That’s just amazing, and I can’t speak enough of how Keith has been an inspiration. There won’t be another Keith time for a time to come. I hope there will be, but big boots to fill.”
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14 October, 2023 – Another World Cup campaign comes to a devastating end as New Zealand beat Ireland by four points in Paris. In the moments after the full-time whistle, Ireland players collapse on the turf, some in tears. Johnny Sexton exchanges a short handshake with Joe Schmidt before moving on, leaving his young son, Luca, behind with the former Ireland coach. Earls, who missed out on the matchday 23 for the game, hangs on, offering to catch a beer with Schmidt before ensuring Luca finds his way back to his parents. As the two leave, the TV cameras catch Earls throwing an arm around Sexton Jr. “You alright, head?” It’s his last act on the Test stage, as half an hour later, Andy Farrell confirms Earls is retiring from rugby.
Over his 16 years as a professional rugby player Earls made over 200 appearances for Munster and won 101 Test caps for Ireland, his 36 tries leaving him second only to Brian O’Driscoll on the all-time top try-scorers list. Somewhere along the way, Munster fans began to refer to him simply as ‘The Man.’ The 2018 Grand Slam and URC medal in 2023 only tell a small part of his story. In 2021, Earls opened up about his mental health struggles in his autobiography, Fight or Flight, and across series of remarkably candid interviews. As Ireland prepared to fly home from Paris two weekends ago, Earls bowed out as one of the most popular and loved players in Irish rugby history.
Nowhere is that love more evident than back in Limerick.
“Every kid in Thomond wants to be Keith,” says Hughes. “And he’s always at hand, he’s only ever a phone call away. He can walk up with bags of gear, and you see a hundred kids running towards him looking for bits and bobs off him.
“Sometimes he’ll come down and just watch matches, and the general view is that he’s just one of our own, a neighbour’s child, you know?
“He hasn’t changed at all. You’d still be dragging conversation out of him but when you hit the right notes with him or if it’s about rugby, he’ll chat away. As long as it’s not about himself.”
