Ireland players look on during the Haka before last year's Test at the Aviva Stadium. Photograph: Ken Sutton/Inpho
On The Irish Times Counter Ruck podcast this week, I spoke about written feedback I received from my Leinster team-mates shortly after my 21st birthday. It was a fairly honest reflection of who I was at the time, someone full of good intentions but a bit like Homer Simpson, easily distracted.
I was failing badly at some of the fundamentals of professionalism, punctuality, self-discipline, and apparently, laundry. One team-mate even wrote that I should buy a washing machine because my gear was always filthy. They weren’t wrong.
I was getting by on a decent skill set and natural ability to beat players one-on-one, but tactically I was naive and still a long way from understanding what being a professional truly meant. Back then, all I could think about was playing for Ireland, which up to then had amounted to a brief cameo at 19-years-old in a 1999 World Cup pool match against Romania.
That was my singular focus, but I never stopped to consider that I hadn’t earned it yet. I got there on reputation, not form.
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