E.E. IS GOD! NOT

YOUR NATIONAL team has endured a losing streak of eleven games, their confidence is transparently in tatters, and tactically they’re almost a laughing stock. For the next game, you are brought into the side in a key position and, hallelujah, you play a crucial role in winning the game, scoring eleven of the team’s nineteen points.

You are then pitted, with your team mates, against an all-conquering England side who look set to deliver your lads an unmerciful hiding. Against daunting odds, you play a stormer, scoring twelve of your team’s points in a seventeen-to-three victory and you are chaired off the pitch by a delirious crowd with your status as a national hero confirmed.

So it was last season for Eric Elwood, Ireland’s long sought-after quality out-half, a man whose international performances thus far belie his relative inexperience at this level. The emergence of a player not even chosen for last season’s Final Trial into such a pivotal role in the team offered a clear indictment of the squad selection process. But for Eric Elwood it was a question of seizing the moment when it eventually presented itself. “I was in the right place at the right time and I got the opportunity,” he confirms. “Ireland didn’t do well against Scotland last year, did better against France, and then I came in. The point is that I actually came into a side that was playing well.”

The transparent improvement in the team’s performance notwithstanding, there still remain questions about their style of play. While Jack Charlton’s adherence to the long ball game inspires criticism of our soccer team, that description can equally be applied to the approach of our rugby representatives, with our wings Simon Geoghegan and Richard Wallace being employed in a predominantly defensive capacity. What is it about Irish teams that the ball has to spend so much goddam time in the air? Is it because we’ve little or no sun to dazzle our eyes when we look skywards?

“You have to take criticism, but at the end of the day we all like to run the ball and we all love scoring tries,” explains Elwood. “On the other hand, if on the day the ball’s not coming right, or the weather’s not right, there’s not a lot you can do. Okay, there have been times when I myself should possibly have run the ball and I didn’t, and I take responsibility for that.”

On the other side of the coin, Eric Elwood can also take responsibility for two stunning drop goals against England last season. Were these part of the predetermined plan or purely impulsive, split-second decisions? “It can depend on the speed of the ball coming through, and back from, the forwards. The second drop goal was impulse. I mean, people can talk about running rugby, but if the ball is too slow, then all their backs have moved up and you know that right along the line you’ll be knocked down by them. It’s about spotting the options and not just a question of run or kick. Some people can watch television and swear ‘why didn’t he run it?’, but it’s not the Sixties where you swivel your hips and it’s out to the wing and back again. Defences are more organised now.”

The twenty-four year old Irish Distillers sales representative certainly has a penchant for superb kicking under pressure, a talent which was evidenced in all his international games thus far and, in particular, against France recently where he kept his team within reach of a rampant France at a critical point in the game with a penalty from inside his own half. Former Irish out-half Tony Ward has said that it was easier for him to kick with a fifty-thousand crowd baying at him than a hushed stadium. Does Elwood agree?

“I would,” he says. “You can hear the silence but not the noise. You’ve got to block things out of your mind because if you start thinking ‘Oh Christ, if I miss this . . .’ or whatever, or you’re waiting for a bang or someone to hit a drum, then you’ve really got to focus on the job at hand and keep your head down and do the normal routine. Sometimes it can be difficult if you miss one or two, you can become conscious of the crowd and the previous misses. It’s all about putting everything to the back of your mind and getting on with the kick.

“A lot of rugby’s in the mind, particularly if you’re a back, a place kicker, or a hooker throwing into the line-out. It’s about technique, routine, getting the mind focussed, getting all the negative thoughts out and the positive ones in, and in your head getting the motion of kicking the ball and where it’s going to go. People often laugh at that, but it does help.”

This was the quality of temperament possessed by Elwood’s favourite out-half of the past, Ollie Campbell. “Although, in some ways, it’s unfair to pick one guy like Ollie out,” he qualifies, “because Ireland has had numerous out-halves of the highest quality. Paul Dean and Tony Ward, for instance.”

Having played just two international matches last season, many commentators felt that Elwood had done enough to be picked for the British and Irish Lions tour to New Zealand last summer. Alas, it was not to be.

“It would’ve been a fantastic honour to be chosen,” he admits. “The strange thing is, I didn’t really get a chance to think about it when they picked the squad because we played England on the Saturday, I was training with Ireland Sevens on the Sunday, and I flew to Hong Kong on the Monday for the Hong Kong Sevens Tournament, so when they picked their side I didn’t think about it. I think it only really hit me when I was sitting at home in the summer watching the games on television saying ‘Oh God, I wish I was there!’ I was on stand-by alright. You’re always hoping somebody will get hurt – but not too seriously!”

There are those who would argue that his experience of other sports has given Elwood’s game a freshness and originality. “I used to play Gaelic Football and soccer,” he elaborates. “In Gaelic, I played inter-county minor, twenty-one’s, and senior for two years in the Championship for Galway. In soccer, I played up to Galway youths level.” And, like so many kids, he had ambitions. “Of course, when you’re young you like to dream!” He would hope that a Manchester United scout would appear on the touchline just to see him! “Particularly since I support them!” he laughs.

So what does he make of the exploits of our national soccer team. “I’ll be watching the World Cup this time. I missed the 1990 one because I was playing in New Zealand and they’re not exactly big soccer enthusiasts down there! I used to see the games a bit late, so I had to go around avoiding the results. The thing is, though, you have people supporting the Irish soccer team who wouldn’t support them during the lean times. Now, because the team has been doing well they’re supporting them, be it a long-ball game or short-game, be it Cascarino or Quinn, they don’t care. It’s only human nature, I guess. But real supporters are the people who were there during the John Giles, Don Givens, Steve Heighway days.”

Whatever the sport, success doesn’t come easily, personal sacrifice and discipline being essential prerequisites. Stephen Jones, for instance, states in his superb book Endless Winter (Mainstream) that in the England rugby set-up, ‘a pint of beer is now regarded with the same derision as flared trousers and records of The Archies’. Elwood has his doubts about the wisdom of such stringency. “I suppose it’s up to whatever suits the individual. People have said that if you keep a guy in the night before a match and put him to bed at ten o’clock when he’s not used to it, then he’ll sit up or he’ll stay awake. We’re all adults and make our own decisions. If you want to have a gallon of drink the night before an international and if it helps you, well and good. But if you can’t perform on the pitch, you’ll answer for it. The Irish management treat us as adults.”

“But I do think that if you want to play for the national team you’ve got to make sacrifices. You can’t be hummin’ and hawin’. You can’t expect to play a match on a Saturday and have a gallon of porter and that’s it. I would rather be up and with the squad on a Sunday morning in the wind and rain than doing nothing. I had a drink on New Year’s Eve and nothing then until after the French match (January 15). Not a huge sacrifice, but it’s an example.”

Such dedication involves not just a strict training regime but a restricted diet, with pasta’s high carbohydrate loading being hailed as just one sports-food par excellence.

“Again, it’s down to the individual’s discipline. To be quite honest, I’m not a steak guy or anything. People might laugh at the pasta thing, but it’s what you’re used to, and that’s the kind of grub I like. It doesn’t stop me going for a Chinese takeaway or a McDonald’s, though!”

What did Elwood make of the criticisms of the New Zealand All-Blacks recently, when the English players branded them as a dirty side? “They’re not dirty, they’re hard men. The English are strange. They’re world champions now because they beat the All-Blacks, the way they go on. We beat England, so we’re the world champions, y’know!

“They set themselves up, and that’s why everybody wants to beat them.”