This story begins at the end of another. The scene is the Stade de la Mosson in Montpellier and Clermont have just beaten Munster in an enthralling Heineken Cup semi-final.
onan O’Gara lingers on the pitch with his son Rua to savour the final moments of his playing career, waving to the pockets of red among the wall of yellow and blue as he picks up the young boy and heads for the tunnel for the last time.
Within weeks, the player became a coach. O’Gara moved his family to Paris to begin work with Racing Metro and they haven’t lived in Ireland since. The year was 2013, the next chapter of ROG’s life story was under way.
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Tomorrow, he’ll ascend the steps at the Stade Marcel Deflandre for another European semi-final.
As a player, he’d be racked with anxiety in the week of the game, but the 44-year-old coach is a different man after his experiences in New Zealand.
“Poles apart,” he says down the phone as he drives home to Île de Ré from training yesterday. “It probably comes with a bit of maturity and age but also I remember finishing up playing and saying if I kept my mentality I had as a player as a coach I’d be dead now.
“I was way too stressed, I worried way too much about performance and it meant nearly too much. Mentally, I couldn’t do that again.
“That final piece of the jigsaw for me personally was those two years in Christchurch. I just have a very different outlook on life now and on rugby.”
Scott Robertson broke the mould by bringing O’Gara to the Crusaders in 2018. The move that came about when his forwards coach Jason Ryan spent some time at Racing 92 as part of his Professional Development. Ryan got talking to Dan Carter who recommended his coach for the role.
So, former All Black Robertson arranged a meeting on the morning of Ireland’s November international against South Africa in 2017 in Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel.
“I thought I’d catch up with him discreetly, but we couldn’t even get out of the hotel lobby,” he told the Irish Independent over the phone from Auckland Airport. “The fanfare, people asking Ronan for a photo was quite relentless as we tried to keep it low-key!
“He told me how he was going to help me, help the team and how excited he was about how much he could learn. The adventure for the family. That’s how it started.”
Robertson, the man expected to be the next All Blacks coach, was looking for something specific.
“Someone with a point of difference. Someone who would come in with a real respect, a different perspective on the game and just think differently,” he said. “Also, someone who could challenge us on what we do and how we could evolve. He did.”
O’Gara admits that the first three or four months were “horrendously difficult”.
“I suppose I didn’t know my level. I didn’t know if I was a good coach, I didn’t know how I would be perceived or be taken,” O’Gara explained.
“I was in unknown territory, completely out of my comfort zone in an environment where the reality is you’re coaching guys you would really have rated as players.”
He equates those first three or four months to his wife Jess’s teacher training at Mary Immaculate College, but one day at training Robertson pulled him aside and told him that he didn’t need to impress people with his knowledge, he needed to make a connection.
“We’re quite a player-driven organisation, they take real ownership of it and he was more probably leaning to the other side of telling them this how we’re going to play,” Robertson said.
“Once we got the balance right, worked together, everyone got the best out of each other.
“Once he’d realised the difference, how you can create better players by giving them ownership and help them lead, build relationships first. We knew he knew his stuff, we knew he knew his rugby, but you need to build relationships before that so the boys have that trust and you can get the best out of them.
“We still have a great relationship, I still catch up with him regularly and he does with a lot of players here. He left a mark on our organisation as a person.”
Over time, and with help from Crusaders general manager of rugby Angus Gardiner, O’Gara became a better communicator.
“He got respect because he understands the game, coaching is a craft. It’s an art. You’re always refining it and mastering it,” Robertson explained.
“He got better at that over time. No doubt. Fourteen clips got down to four and that’s an art in itself, he changed a lot of the way we defend. He put a lot of heat on guys, brought a lot of mindset on it and refined that as well.
“He had that Irish passion, but he then realised he had to understand his audience and got the best out of them.
“For him to come in, it wasn’t all plain sailing. There was lots of conversations between me and him about how can we get better.
“Angus Gardiner is a schoolteacher himself, he sat at the back of the room, listened to him and gave him lots of feedback around messages, how they were directed and how they were received.
“He put a lot of time and resource into it as well, I think when he left he’d been better for the experience and going to La Rochelle he’s better for the money too! Fair play to him, you don’t coach in Super Rugby for the money, that’s for sure.”
For O’Gara, that communication training was key.
“You’ve got to understand what teaching looks like as well. There’s more to it than just rugby coaching, you’ve got to understand how to teach, what buttons to press,” the former out-half said.
“That’s where Angus Gardiner was really helpful, upskilling me in that regard in delivering your message in how to teach.”
Over time, O’Gara grew into the role and Robertson tapped into the competitive spirit that drove him to such heights as a player.
“He’s a competitor. The way he played, the way he prepared for games, his obsession with kicking. His passion,” Robertson recalled.
“One of the best pre-game speeches I’ve ever had was him talking about ‘going to the well’. It was just how passionate he was. You could see people playing for him.
“We played the Lions over here, we’d beaten them the year before in the final so it was a huge game. I said to him, ‘Do you want to do the pre-game’ and he said, ‘Oh, you think so?’
“I said, ‘Just come with a bit of Irishry’ and he said, ‘We’re going to the well, boys’ and they did. They just kept digging deeper. It was pretty special moment. That’s what I remember, he had the rugby intellect but he connected on a spiritual level as well.”
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O’Gara describes himself as “winging it” during his first stint as a coach at Racing.
He began as an ‘international coach’, hired by the Laurent Labit and Laurent Travers to help assimilate the overseas players. Ostensibly, his role involved coaching skills but the backroom team was small and the Ireland legend rolled up his sleeves.
Within three seasons, he’d been on the sidelines as Racing narrowly missed out on a European title against Saracens and then survived being down to 14 men for most of the Nou Camp final as the Parisian club overcame Toulon in the Top 14 final.
By then, he was in charge of the team’s defence; at the Crusaders he did the attack and backline defence and now he’s in charge of La Rochelle’s rugby programme.
In his early days, he was prone to getting into heated disagreements with officials and resultant disciplinary hot water.
Having cut it out in Christchurch, the self-critic within him can sense that he’s slipping back into a bad habit.
“The Top 14 games, it’s nearly like an old-school GAA game 30 years ago where you’re on the sideline and can influence the ref and roar at him,” he said.
“It’s empty stadia, your voice can be heard. I’ve got to stop myself, by doing a bit of self-talk and not getting into that place, because it’s a waste of time.
You need to stay on task, but that’s a weakness of mine.
“In the Crusaders, Razor (Robertson) has rules in the coaches’ box. You’re not allowed to commentate, which is a great rule. You’ve none of this playing the game as a supporter, you’ve got to stay on task with what you’ve identified and what your role in the box is.
“Am I looking for kick-space, what’s their openside winger doing in defence? For example. A few nuggets like that.”
The Crusaders taught him how to structure a week, encouraged him to appreciate the power of positive thinking and, of course, two years of intense interaction with some of the world’s best rugby players helped him improve as a coach as he develops his ‘Keep Ball Alive’ philosophy.
After 24 months and two Super Rugby titles, it was time to put that education into practice as his own man. La Rochelle was the perfect fit.
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There is, O’Gara says, no masterplan to his coaching career.
“The only plan has been my mindset post-Axel (Anthony Foley), post-Paul Derbyshire,” he said of his sadly departed former friends.
“That’s been the two biggest impacts on my decision-making, that’s why you’ve got to enjoy the journey, you’ve got to enjoy this week.
“You’ve got to enjoy the prep for the Leinster game, the Captain’s Run, the game itself. You could get a tonking, but that’s what happens in sport and it doesn’t change and you become closed, nervous and uptight about it.
“Because the players will read you really quickly. ‘The coach isn’t stressed normally, he’s stressed today. Maybe I should be stressed’.
“You’ve already probably lost the game by that stage, it’s very important how I present myself on game-day as well. The words I use, my body language and stuff.
“But, no, my career hasn’t been planned. Everyone thinks there’s a masterplan, there’s not. The Crusaders thing came out of the blue, that’s why every day nearly counts in this game too.
“It’s the same with the players, I try and drill it into them; consistency of behaviour, consistency of preparation. The coaching game, you can’t be like a see-saw. You can’t be up one day and down the next, you’re going to break down some day if that’s the way it’s been.”
O’Gara recently told comedian Mario Rosenstock that he has ambitions to coach Ireland. Munster fans will want him home some day.
Robertson believes he has what it takes to coach his country.
“He’s got all the attributes to become an international coach,” Robertson said. “It’s just timing for him, his family and people around him.
“He’s set himself up nicely, we go to the northern hemisphere but for him to buck the trend was quite pioneering for him.
“Again, with five young kids and Jess his wife it wasn’t easy all the time. It’s a long way from the grandparents.
“That challenge, but also the maturity they got out of it... for him, I think it was more about the rugby. It was actually, looking back, it was a bloody good time with Ronan. He’s a good man.”
For now, La Rochelle is home. His new three-year contract means he’ll have responsibility for the entire rugby side of the club from next season and he is fully invested in bringing success to the Atlantic city.
”It reminded me of the early days of Munster with 16,000 people in the stadium for full houses for 51 or 52 games in a row,” he says of the club.
“I like having fanatical supporters, that’s what gives me a buzz. I enjoy that. Having people that are very passionate about their team.
“That’s why La Rochelle appealed to me, and the fact that you were taking a club that had huge downside in that if it doesn’t go well ‘he’s no good’ and the other side is that the club has done nothing and hasn’t a big name.
“I looked at where you could potentially get with this club and that’s very exciting.”
Tomorrow, he’ll experience his 12th European semi-final and his first where he’s calling the shots from the coaching box. He’s in his element.
“I absolutely love it,” he says. “It’s not stressful, it’s not riddled with pressure. Far from it. I must say I’m enjoying it.”
O’Gara’s first act was something special, but thanks to his spell in New Zealand his second is promising to be just as intriguing.
