Ronan O'Gara may not yet be ready for Munster – but Munster are clearly not ready for him

Pointing the way: La Rochelle head coach Ronan O'Gara before the Heineken Champions Cup Round of 16 match against Gloucester at Kingsholm Stadium. Photo: Matt Impey/Sportsfile

David Kelly Twitter Email

April 22 2021 08:25 PM

It is eight years since two Irish exiles in Paris sipped strong coffee and wondered about how the rivers of life can carry a body to not always familiar places.

Ronan O’Gara and Jonathan Sexton were once visceral professional rivals but now one was the teacher and the other pupil in this wondrous city of effervescent enlightenment.

And when the younger man turned to the older man and asked him did he ever see the day when one day he might do it all, be in complete and full charge of a club, the man who was only appointed to be a goal-kicking and backs kicking coach smiled over his steaming espresso.

“Yeah, maybe in time,” O’Gara said. Well, that time has come.

La Rochelle’s announcement that O’Gara will assume complete control of rugby affairs until 2024 is not sensational news; although that should not denude its sensational importance in the fascinating career development of a man who will one day help shape Irish rugby.

When word again filtered through this week that Clermont’s interest in repatriating Jono Gibbes had accelerated – principally because Jeremy Davidson had rebuffed them for a third time in order to remain loyal to Brive – the subsequent shuffling of the cards always seemed set to turn up an ace in the Corkman’s favour.

It’s not the first time Davidson did his old mucker an inadvertent favour.

We also remember the Dungannon lock accidentally smashing Neil Jenkins in a Lions training session once which allowed O’Gara an effortless debut in the famous red shirt against Western Australia in another century.

As an aside, Brive’s Covid outbreak has also allowed La Rochelle an extra week to prepare for their forthcoming European Cup semi-final against Leinster; O’Gara should be sending a decent claret up north to his friend.

You make your own luck in this game and take your chances, too. And, as his playing career taught him, when you miss them, you learn the lessons.

O’Gara absorbed them all to rebound from a missed European final kick to reboot Munster’s quest for a Grail that has almost cursed them ever since.

And in a coaching life, he has scribbled daily notes to himself, compiling a biblical tome of tactical and philosophical maxims borrowed from the four corners of the rugby world, and hewn from some of its greatest minds.

One of the (many) misconceptions about O’Gara occurs with the easy, but lazy, attempts to pigeon-hole him into a conveniently geographical comparison to that other famed Corkonian of his era, Roy Keane.

But there is far more that separates them in our view; and a key fundamental is patience; Keane’s deficit is the principal reason he is out of club work for more than a decade.

In contrast, in the eight years since he incipiently began his steady, now inexorable ascent to the top of the sport, O’Gara’s patience has been his most worthy ally; a virtue in French rugby which is worth far more than in any other territory, too.

And patience will be one of the principal traits that will accompany him as he embraces a role that to some might seem the summit of ambition but for O’Gara it is merely another stepping stone on a long and winding journey.

For summits and peaks hold no interest for him; it is only the pathway which endures as a symbol of constant movement forward, with all the occasional stumbles and breaths of wonder it may entail.

“My every impulse bends to what is right,” said Homer’s wandering hero Odysseus.

O’Gara’s instinct may, someday, freight him homeward, but for now his impulse remains to maintain the exhaustive pattern of lessons and mistakes, one which will now encompass an even vaster remit, from player contracts to (almost) the type of paint used on the walls of the cafeteria.

This is the culture into which he will now be fully immersed, one so divorced from that of Munster – or Leinster, for that matter – that the repeated calls for him to return to rescue his native province appear touchingly naïve.

Their context, of course, places his inevitable rise against Munster’s stasis in the eight years since his final probings as a player on French soil left them within reach, and yet still so out of touch, with Europe’s elite.

Nothing has changed for Munster but everything has changed for O’Gara since then. And the questions about the pair’s potential re-unification has long since changed too.

It is not a case of when Ronan O’Gara will be ready for Munster but when will Munster be ready for Ronan O’Gara?

While the individual has effected enormous personal growth in the last decade, the club he left may have made progress in some areas but there has been jarring stagnation in others.

He himself alluded to Munster’s identity deficit recently and, before you touch on upon the struggling Academy, only recently revived, and the inchoate game-plan, conceived by disparate coaches, there are a surfeit of reasons why now is the time for O’Gara to be anywhere but at home.

He may indeed return but assuming he sees out his contract he will be more than 11 years away and by that stage perhaps only the international game might be able to match his status in 2024.

For now, he is not ready for Munster. And Munster is not ready for him.