IT’S TWO DAYS after Luke Marshall ran in two Heineken Cup tries to help put Treviso to the sword.
The noise in Ravenhill’s new executive lounge has long since died down, but the centre barely makes a sound as he walks through the doors.
There is a faint clap in the sparsely filled room as grips a hand to greet Iain Henderson, but other than that, the noise belongs to others.
It was one of the first adaptations Marshall’s coaches tried to make in his game: more communication, louder.
“You’re probably not the chattiest person off the pitch but it doesn’t matter,” Marshall says to paraphrase the lesson his 16-year-old self took on at Ballymena Academy.
“You’ve got to become the loudest person on the pitch. If you don’t, you’re not going to be able to go that far.”
Obviously, he has.. 2013 has been a year of breakthrough for the Ulster centre, winning his first four international caps after earning a first-team jersey with the northern province and ultimately becoming a go-to weapon as Ulster took top spot in their Heineken Cup pool.
As sharp as his rise has been though, there is a looming shadow over the middle six months his year: three concussions in four weeks turning his breakthrough season into an unlucky 2013. As he twirls his car keys in his hand, you get the sense that he would rather leave the concussion talk to the neurologists.
“I’m happy enough to move on, but I can still understand why there’s so much talk about it. With Ben Robinson from Ulster dying on the pitch at under 15 level it’s massively in the press and I’m sure there’s a lot of worried parents at school level when something like that happens.
“And then my concussions go on TV and raise a few issues. I can understand that, but I think personally I’m definitely past that. I don’t feel any ill effects from it and I just want to move on, get on with my rugby and stick to that.”
The 22-year-old has made that much clear in the past. His relief was there for all to see in a post-match interview earlier this season when he spoke about taking some knocks to the head that would have floored him in March or April. Now he’s back to full health and, hopefully, with the requisite experience to know when putting his hand up to play on is not in his best interests.
“I hadn’t really experienced it before last year, so I didn’t really know what to look for,” he says.
“It’s always tough when you don’t know the individual signs you should be looking for in yourself. You’re always eager to play the next week and your body disguises everything, tells you, ‘I’m fine’. Though, to be fair, my symptoms of concussion weren’t very bad if any.
“That made it very hard for me. A lot of guys had dizziness, headaches, nausea and what not. I had none of that. So it was sort of tough for me to tell.”
Before Marshall was a free-running centre, he was a prodigiously talented out-half. In fact, he took a fair bit of persuading before moving into midfield when making the Ulster under 20 grade. He gives one of his most emphatic responses when asked if, three years ago, he would have been happy to enter a straight fight for the province’s number 10 shirt with Paddy Jackson:
“Definitely. At school I just loved being the controller of things, always having my hands on the ball.
‘He’s pretty good’
“My brother played 12 and I always thought you just had to crash it up, and I thought ‘I don’t really want that’. That’s why I still played 10 that first year [out of school] for Ballymena because that’s what I wanted to do.
“I think it was really the next season with Ulster under 20; I was playing outside Paddy and then that Aviva game [to open the redeveloped stadium] playing outside him. Then I sort of realised, ‘this isn’t too bad, he’s pretty good, so I’m going to give it a go.’”
He has done that and more. And Marshall will have found it refreshing that he isn’t always required to run the crash ball. Quite the contrary, at 12 Marshall is afforded freedom to roam when his side are in possession and appears to have an uncanny knack of both popping up to collect his team-mate’s offloads and providing the finishing scoring touch to moves with a perfectly executed line.
“It’s probably just happening a bit more this season because I’m getting to know the guys in the backline even better. People like Jared [Payne] and Darren [Cave] are such intelligent runners with the ball. They’re always carrying in two hands and drawing in defenders and you just learn to pick lines off their shoulder. To be fair, they make it pretty easy.
“I suppose from my point of view, the way I’ve always played rugby was always instinctively. I wouldn’t do a lot off the pitch – if we’re doing backs meetings I wouldn’t be doing the talking or explaining things. I sort of just play it as I see it on the pitch.”
From the evidence so far, there’s little reason for Marshall to change.
