THERE IS YET another Sean O’Brien in Irish rugby. We’re up to four now, and counting. To start with, you have the two at Connacht and that’s before we get to the chap who was once European player of the year, a British & Irish Lion, Irish international and multiple medallist with Leinster.
Now let’s introduce you to Sean O’Brien IV. He too is a Leinster flanker, making his way through the club’s academy and lately into the Ireland U20 set-up. You only had to see him glance at the crest on his Ireland polo shirt to realise what this means to him.
While it isn’t hard to be cynical about international sport, particularly when governments use it as a vehicle to promote their own shady form of nationalism, at this level a degree of purity remains. You could hear it in the voice of this young man as he talked about the day he was first told he was going to play for the Ireland Schools team. “Hearing those words, ‘you’re going into (Ireland) camp’, that was just really, really cool,” he said.
It was such a surprise the first time I was called up. Even now, it’s still so special because you feel like you are representing a whole group of people who put so much work into you. You just want to do your best for them.”
There’s a couple of ways of going about this. There’s the rugby, obviously, but away from the training field, the coaching staff have carefully cultivated a culture of togetherness in this U20 squad, subtly banning mobile phones at the dinner table, working out ways to get players from different provinces to mingle.
“We all make the effort,” O’Brien says. “Like, there are 20 of us from Leinster so the easy thing would be to sit with the guys I know.
“But we’ve all worked hard to create a real bond and take ourselves out of our comfort zone. We did a lot of exercises in team building at (their training camp) in Fota Island last week. We really got to know each other well. We feel, as a team, we are ready to go into a big challenge like the Six Nations.”
It’s a particularly big challenge for this Irish side given what they did last year, winning a grand slam. As a result expectation levels are high even though, in reality, the majority of that squad have moved on and this essentially is a new Irish team.
It still has the makings of being a good one, though. O’Brien, although capable of playing all across the back-row, finds the No6 shirt fits him best. “I think I am quite good at ball carrying,” he said. “I just try to be pretty good at everything. I don’t think there is anything in particular that I am brilliant at but I always make sure that I work really hard. In the back-row, I can jump the line as well, which is quite handy.”
It certainly won’t do him any harm, not just over the course of this championship but also in the medium to long term. There’s a clear pathway up ahead for him via the Leinster academy. Caelan Doris and Max Deegan walked that road in recent years. “Caelan would have been just three years ahead of me in Blackrock (College) so to see how far he is gone since he left school, it gives you great encouragement.
“It just shows if you keep your head down and work hard like he did, he was excellent at U20s level, if you can do that, then really you can go the whole way.”
