Ronan O’Gara could not get over Joe Schmidt’s reaction to mistakes in training.
Ask O’Gara about his 12 days involved with Ireland – at Carton House and in the United States – and his eyes light up. He arrived in Maynooth, earlier this month, eager to learn everything and anything he could from Joe Schmidt – a man he holds in the highest regard.
Prepare as he did, nothing could stack up to being pitched straight into a Schmidt-led Irish training session.
The former Munster and Ireland outhalf spoke about his ‘work experience’ with Ireland on The Hard Yards rugby podcast [from 5:30 below] and about what happens when Schmidt ramps up the pressure.
O’Gara admitted the Irish squad, during his time as a player, would have often caught up with a few good stories from the weekend over flat white coffees. Now, he says, the current crop had their laptops out and were straight to it.
“Joe was fantastic,” he said. “Every player that was in camp, he had made a personal video for them. A work-on video or his ‘moments’ video as he called them – looking on things that they had done well.”
Not only do the conversation-starting videos focus on what each player needs to do for Ireland, it gives them pointers on how they can improve as a player – individually and with the team in mind.
“Sometimes as players,” he says, “and we are all guilty of this, you think ‘Oh, I’m great at that’ and you look at the video and go ‘Ooooh, maybe that’s not as good as I think it is.”
O’Gara confesses there was an element of depression that kicked in when his time with the squad was coming to an end – with the coaches and players heading off to Japan and himself heading back for a well-earned summer holiday.
“It was weird. I felt like I was being dropped... The competitor [I have] inside me and the atmosphere he creates; the pressure to perform.
“I wasn’t doing that much coaching. I was watching him and doing a lot of work with the assistant coaches. I chatted to him and did a good bit of work with Joe but he’s so thorough. He has an answer to everything.
“You might suggest something and you get put in your place pretty quickly – ‘Yeah, yeah ROG’.
“It was just… if you are a competitor, it is such a great environment. Your capacity to grow and be challenged is something I’ve never seen.”
O’Gara said he would have loved to have been a No.10 in a Joe Schmidt team and revealed how the Kiwi – contrary to many reports – does encourage his players to be expansive and back themselves if they spy an opening.
However, you wouldn’t want to be the first man to drop a pass or make a notable mistake in training. O’Gara said:
“The intensity of training is so fascinating and it was a buzz to be involved in… but once the first ball goes down, there’s a bit of panic that sets in and that’s where Joe comes into his own. He wants to create those really hard training conditions.
“You could see the guys that aren’t that used to pressure folding up a bit. It was just fascinating psychologically.”
If you can’t make it when Schmidt puts the heat on in training, there is not much chance one will do it in the pressure cooker of Test rugby.
It’s no wonder many of the players that Schmidt used to coach in his Leinster days often looked forward to Ireland training under Declan Kidney and his coaching staff.
