The team bus can often be an early proving ground for new players. One mistake, though, and there may be strife ahead.
Keeping a squad of 40+ senior players content is far from easy and squeezing them all onto the one bus is just as tough.
Picking the right seat can be another mine-field, especially if you are only new to the squad. Former Leinster flanker Kevin McLaughlin brilliantly recalled one team bus mishap that saw him get off to a rotten start with Munster prop John Hayes.
“I remember the very first time I got onto the coach to go to a training session,” he told The Hard Yards, “and I just plonked myself down.
“I wasn’t at the back I was about three seats from the back of the bus, and everyone started giving me funny stares. I was like what is everyone looking at like, ‘What have I done wrong here?’
“I saw a few people sniggering or whatever and then saw John Hayes marching down the bus. He’s got this filthy look like a bull on his face.
“That’s my seat!”
“Sorry Mr. Hayes,” I said as I legged it to the front of the bus.”
Peter O’Mahony would have experienced the same trepidations and pitfalls when he started out with Munster. ‘The Bull’ Hayes was still playing when the Cork back-row broke into the Munster team, as were club legends Ronan O’Gara, Paul O’Connell, David Wallace, Marcus Horan, Jerry Flannery and more.
Munster, like the All Blacks, settled their seating arrangements by experience and sheer force of personality.
During our feature on the current Munster captain – ‘The Making of Peter O’Mahony’ – Tomás O’Leary tells a brilliant story about how quickly the young back-row settled in. He said:
“Whenever Pete spoke, he was very confident in everything he said. He would never have backed down to anybody, be it one of the more perceived, established players. So you could always tell that he was so confident and self-assured.”
“He had a big reputation from obviously captaining underage sides,” O’Leary continued, “in Presentation and Irish schools, so he came into a star-studded Munster squad with an established back row. But you could tell that he had the bit between his teeth and he was determined to make his own name.
“I left to go to London Irish [in 2012] and when I got back to Munster [in 2015], he had the back seat of the bus taken and had kind of made his mark in the interim.”
The back row for the back row. The new king in town.
This man has Munster Rugby coursing through his veins.
