Ronan O’Gara had 12 Ireland caps when the British & Irish Lions came around to selecting their squad to tour Australia, in 2001.
Still, he was not expecting to get the call.
“I was a bolter, no doubt about it,” O’Gara told The Hard Yards.
“I played a good Six Nations but did I think it’d be good enough to get ahead of Gregor Townsend? No, but I got in.”
The former Munster and Ireland outhalf shared a wonderful story [from 11:13 below] about getting that Lions call-up and about convincing himself he might be heading back to Australia in 2013.
O’Gara was one of six Irish players that got the initial Lions call but Tyrone Howe and Munster teammate David Wallace were injury replacements during the tour Down Under. O’Gara recalled:
“I got a call from Donal Lenihan, who was the tour manager, the night before. It was around a quarter past eleven and the squad was being announced the next day.
“I was up in Jessica’s house so I immediately got in the car and drove over to my parent’s house and started knocking on the window. They didn’t know what was going on. But that’s how much it meant.
“That was 2001 and times have changed; technology has changed. But I suppose to be ringing someone at quarter past eleven, on a mobile, was strange because you respected the values that anything after six was [the cut-off].”
O’Gara believes Ireland’s current Lions will have long dreamt of making this tour and this will be a chance for themselves to prove themselves against the very best. It’s exactly what drove him in his final season as a rugby player, in 2012/13.
“The competitor inside you,” he said, “means you’re subbing for Ireland and you’re still thinking, ‘Maybe they need a bit of experience’.
“That’s how wildly your mind gets carried away because you still think you can offer something on tour – ‘Yeah, I’ve an outside shot… maybe I could offer something for the final 20 minutes’ – but the day you stop thinking like that is the day you’re finished.”
For O’Gara, it was a life-long love affair and one that has not sated even though his boots are long hung up.
