The Kearney Code - Dave Kearney Interview

The cruciate ligament tear in May that still has him sidelined apart, last season was a damn near perfect one for Leinster and Ireland winger Dave Kearney. Coming on for the latter in the 59th minute of their autumn international against Samoa, he managed to score two tries and but for an uncharacteristic knock-on would have bagged his hat-trick. His former Leinster coach, Joe Schmidt, was impressed enough to start him in February’s Six Nations opener against Scotland in The Aviva, with the 25-year-old going on to play every minute of every game as Ireland trounced everyone bar the English to claim the silverware. His Six Nations omnipresence was matched by Jamie Heaslip and his older brother Rob, more of whom anon.

He would have tasted victory in the Pro12 Final too had it not been for that injury during Leinster’s narrow 13-9 semi-final defeat of Ulster. Off the pitch, Kearney completed the second year of his Business Studies degree at DIT, and put some of that knowledge to good use by joining forces with Sean O’Brien, the aforementioned Mr. Heaslip and the bro to take over Bellamy’s bar in Ballsbridge. Following a major refurb the pub, which is a line-out’s throw from both the RDS and the Aviva, re-opened last month as the Bridge 1859 and has been getting rave reviews all-round.
The Bridge 1859 was the venue this week as Hot Press bagged some chinwag time with Kearney who absolutely insisted we try a pint of the fresh unpasteurised Pilsner Urquell that’s drawn from the four large copper tanks inside the doorway. Ah, sure, it would’ve been rude not to!
Despite a couple of previous run-ins with the media who got themselves in a right old tizzy in July when he broke-up with his model girlfriend of two years, Hayley Ryan, Dave is open, friendly and considered in the answers he gives to questions.
HOT PRESS: I hear last month’s Bridge 1859 launch was quite the party! Did Jamie belt out Nelly’s ‘Hot In Herre’ like he did at another do I was at shortly after you’d won the Six Nations in Paris?
DAVE: Jesus, no! One of the owners or not, the doormen were on standby to chuck him out if he started rapping. Anyway, Jamie behaved himself and it was a really good night. Obviously the rugby comes first, but with me doing a Business Studies degree I want to be as hands-on as possible and learn about the trade. It’s not a sleeping partner-type arrangement. You never know what’s round the corner. We were all gutted last year when (Leinster centre) Eoin O’Malley had to retire. Like me, he did his cruciate and also broke his fibula just above the shin. We had a big game coming up in a few weeks which Eoin half-thought he’d be back for, but then he had to get an operation and another operation after that. Suddenly he realises he can’t play any more. It’s hard to see a talented guy at the start of his career go through that. He came in and told the squad that he was giving up and, well, it was heartbreaking. You’re in your dream job doing something you’ve loved since you were seven, or eight, and suddenly it’s taken away from you. I think it’s important to start dipping into your future, to get yourself a degree.
What was racing through your head when you got your own injury, other than, “Fuck, this hurts!”?
“That’s five months out.” I knew I was going to miss the final and the Ireland tour of Argentina. If you’d said to me 12 months ago, “You’ll score twice in your debut; start against the All Blacks; play every minute of the Six Nations; win a Six Nations medal but end the season with a big injury,” I’d have taken it. You get greedy, though. Not playing against Glasgow Warriors and going to Argentina took a bit of the gloss off the season for a while, but now I realise how fortunate I was to get all that game time.
Were you at any point worried that it might be career-threatening?
No, but then neither did Eoin, so perhaps I just didn’t want to think in those terms.
How long before you’re ready to start training again?
It’s been nearly four-and-a-half months now, so I’m hoping three to five weeks. I’d love to take part in the Autumn Internationals, but don’t think I’ll get enough games under my belt to be picked. It’s a shame because South Africa and Australia, especially, will be really good tests. You want to be playing the Southern Hemisphere teams with the World Cup coming up.
Are you worried that someone might come in and nick your place?
Even if fully fit I mightn’t start because the coach we have now loves to try out different players in different positions. I’m not sure of the exact amount of guys he used in the Six Nations, but it wasn’t the same 23 every weekend, it’s always changing. As a squad you really need to have 35 to 40 players who are able to step in and perform at that level. There’s no such thing as a nailed-down starting XV in rugby. By the time the World Cup comes around, I guarantee you there’ll be someone in the team who’s barely being mentioned now. They’ll get a chance, because of injuries perhaps, and stake a claim.
Watching the Munster defeat last week from the stands must have been frustrating.
Yeah, I thought about nipping home at half-time to get my boots! I was looking at it thinking, “Jeez, I want to hit a ruck!” You just want to get stuck in and help your team. We’ve had a poor start with big players like Cian Healy and Sean O’Brien missing but we’ll come good. I was chatting about it the other day to Brian O’Driscoll who it’s even worse for because he’s retired. Hopefully I’ll be back in a few weeks but he’ll have to carry on suffering from the sidelines!
Is there a Drico-shaped hole in the dressing-room?
Obviously we miss having him around and having him on the pitch as well. It does give other guys an opportunity to step into Brian’s shoes though. We’ve a great academy set-up at Leinster with a lot of young lads coming through.
Any we should be keeping a particularly close eye on?
I better choose from the forwards or else I’ll get in trouble! The two Byrne brothers - Ed who’s a prop and Bryan’s who’s a hooker - played together for the first time against Munster and made a real impact. They're definitely stars of the future.
People I know in Limerick were worried that the recent leaking of confidential Munster player reports might cause disharmony in the dressing-room, but it only seems to have galvanised them against Leinster.
Definitely. I imagine some of the Munster guys felt they had a point to prove. Like us, they’ve been injury stricken for the last few weeks, needed a big win to kickstart their season and got it by being the better team on the day.
Jonny Wilkinson went on a bit of rant recently saying it isn’t, but quite a few people - including one suspects the Leicester Tigers coach who has 23 players out through injury - believe rugby has become too dangerous.
Guys bulking up has definitely made the game more physical. I think forwards are on average 10kg heavier than they were 10 years ago. That makes for some really big hits and impacts.
And concussions. According to Acquired Brain Injury Ireland, they’ve become the third most common match-day injury. In theory anybody who gets thwacked in the head should come straight off, but when it’s your star player in a big match there must be a temptation for doctors and coaches to keep them on the pitch.
No, with all the hype about it, doctors have no choice. Everyone’s got the message that you can’t mess around with head injuries. Touch wood I’ve only really had two concussions in my 17, 18 years of playing. On one of those occasions, I had to be hauled off the pitch when I was adamant I wanted to stay on, and was out for seven weeks. Proper care was taken of me. I was doing tests every week, I had a scan on my head and couldn’t return to training until I’d passed all those marks. It’s taken a lot more seriously now than it was back in the day.
Who’s given you the nastiest smack in a tackle?
Wales’ George North is very powerful, very strong, very fast, he’s a handful. Alex Cuthbert’s another big lad who lets you know he’s there.
You’re probably far too modest to say it, but I was talking to somebody from your old GAA club, Cooley Kickhams, who reckons you were good enough to play senior football for Louth.
It’s hard to know how far I’d have got. You really miss it, though. When you watch the Championship games and the All-Ireland, you’re like, “God, I’d love to get back for a game and a kick around.” Depending on what nick my body’s in at the end of my rugby career, I’d love to play football again.
Was it a tough decision choosing between rugby and GAA?
I loved Gaelic but, especially with Rob playing professionally and my eldest brother Richard representing Clongowes Wood College where we all went in the Senior Cup, I always knew rugby was my main sport. It was a sad day when I had to give it up, but as an 18-year old going into the Leinster Academy and playing for Leinster Schools you couldn’t be picking up injuries playing other sports.
If it had been 50/50 between the two, would the fact you get paid for playing rugby have tipped the balance?
If you were split down the middle, yeah, that would definitely come into it. Personally, I think the GAA lads should get a few bob for the amount of work they put in. It’s a great reward playing for your county, but they’re training so hard it has to affect their 9-5s in terms of time taken off and being too knackered after a game to function properly. One of our new physios, Dave Breen, is a Limerick hurler. He’ll be with us all day, go home to Limerick to train, come back up and go down again at the weekend to play. It’s probably costing some of them to represent their counties.
Getting back to your own sporting endeavours, there aren’t too many Irish rugby players who’ve come on for their international debut with just over 20 minutes to go and scored two tries.
Yeah, it was all pretty surreal. That November period was big for me. I was happy with how I’d been performing and really wanted to get that Irish cap under my belt. I’d come close two years before in the Six Nations when I was on the bench for the first game against Wales, but ended up not getting my boots dirty. Then I picked up a couple of injuries and things sort of drifted until, having got the coach’s job, Joe called me back into the squad. With him knowing how close I’d come to making my debut before, I had a good feeling he’d bring me on in the second-half against Samoa. With only 20 minutes, you just want to be busy and get your hands on the ball as much as you can. Thankfully I was on the end of a few nice moves, which got me on the scoresheet.
You then came within a whisker of beating the All Blacks. How traumatised were you by their winning injury-time try and conversion?
You’re always gutted when you lose games. You’re down, you’re annoyed, you’re disappointed. In the dressing-room afterwards we were deflated, but going into the Six Nations the fact that we should have beaten the All Blacks was a huge confidence booster.
Do you prepare differently when it’s the reigning World Champions you’re up against?
Not really. The fact that Joe knows the All Black mentality, has coached a lot of their guys and believed we could win was a help, but it’s the same with every game - you go through your moves week in, week out; make sure you know exactly what your role is and then give it 100% on the day.
Joe Schmidt was succeeded at Leinster by Matt O’Connor. How do they compare as coaches?
They’re both very, very good and like to play a similar game. Joe is a real stickler for detail. All of our games and training sessions are videoed from different angles, so there’s no hiding; he picks everything up. If you’re not doing something correctly or you’re not working hard enough, he’ll let you know. Everybody’s had the hair-dryer treatment from him! Going into the Ireland set-up it was definitely a help knowing how Joe operated - and vice versa, I guess. He did a lot for me at Leinster, as has Matt who came in and gave me a lot of big games that in previous seasons I’d have struggled to get. Between the two of them, I’m getting the best rugby education possible.
Talk us through those final 15 minutes in Stade de France. You must have been going, “Bloody hell, we’re close!”
You don’t dwell on it much during the game. The last thing you want to do is think, “We’re seven points ahead, let’s keep it that way.” You don’t want to lose sight of the job at hand and the things you have to do. If you take your foot off the pedal because you’re two tries up, that will ultimately have an effect on your game and the other team will get into it. Especially when you’re playing in Paris against France, a team that love to throw the ball around and attack. To be honest, there was a moment with a few minutes to go that I thought, “Are we going to let this slip? Is this going to be the All Blacks over again?’ Thankfully it wasn’t!
Did you instinctively know that it was a forward pass?
I did, yeah. I was right beside it and saw the ball land in front. I was straight over to the touch-judge saying, “Forward pass, forward pass!’ and asking him to go to the video ref. Some of the lads were at different angles and couldn’t tell, so I was saying “It’s forward, it’s forward!” to them as well.
Italy have the ability to be party poopers, but with them, France, Canada and Romania your Pool D World Cup competition, you must be confident of making it through to the knock-out stages.
You’d probably look at Pool A - Australia, England, Wales and Fiji - and say, “That’s a bit harder” but to be honest all the groups are strong. Quality-wise, the Six Nations was the best it’s been for a long time last season - everyone had their good days - and the Southern Hemisphere teams have been in excellent form too. Ideally, you want to be winning your group and avoiding the big teams until later in the knock-outs.
My 85-year-old Home Counties-residing Mum is adamant that England’s entire focus has been on winning the World Cup, like it was under Clive Woodward when prior to Australia 2003 successive Six Nations were more or less surrendered in order to assure victory Down Under.
I’m not sure what kind of picture they’re looking at, but they’ve got some really good players - both established and coming through - and are only getting better and better. Beating the All Blacks two seasons ago at Twickenham was massive for them. They’ve an excellent coach and home advantage of course, so they’ll take some beating. As will Ireland. Everything will need to come together next year, but we have the confidence and belief to win the World Cup.
Have you read much of the Roy Keane coverage?
I’ve seen a few quotes; some of it’s pretty outrageous.
What did you make of him saying that Manchester United in the Champions League was a bigger deal than representing Ireland?
I can see where he’s coming from - playing for the best club in Europe, winning the Champions League and then coming back to Dublin - but it’s different with rugby. No matter how big the European Champions Cup becomes, the Six Nations and the World Cup will be bigger. Playing for your country’s the highest honour there is.
As undoubtedly entertaining as Roy’s musings are, dressing-rooms and managers’ offices are places where you should be able to speak your mind without worrying that somebody's taking notes for his/her book.
My only real objection would be if it’s somebody I’m currently playing with or being coached by. It's highly unlikely he would do, but were Brian O’Driscoll to criticise me in the book he’s got coming out, I’d go, “Well, that’s what he thinks.” I’m not saying I would’t be annoyed and fall out with him or whoever over it, but he’s entitled to his opinion and I wouldn’t have a go back at him in the press.
While there were people to go to when he had a tweaked groin, Niall Breslin says that during his Leinster tenure there was no one on the medical staff he could talk to about his mental health issues. Is that sort of help available now?
There are three team doctors you can go to about anything. If you’ve a bad knee then he has to tell the coach, but if it were anxiety or depression it’d be totally confidential. The Irish Rugby Union Players’ Association are also there to deal with that kind of stuff. If I thought one of the other lads was suffering with depression I’d have a quiet word with IRUPA.
Acknowledging you’re depressed and telling people who may or may not react positively is in many ways a coming out process. Which dovetails with a question a rugby-loving lesbian friend of mine wanted me to ask you; what would the reaction be in the Leinster dressing-room if one of the guys said he was gay?
It definitely wouldn’t be a problem. You’re not going to look at them any differently. The former Welsh captain Gareth Thomas did it there a few years ago which is great, and other guys started coming out then. Nobody would give a teammate stick for being gay - if they did, the rest of us would have a word and tell them in no uncertain terms to stop.
One of the downsides of being an Ireland rugby international is that, as happened in September, you get long-lensed by a pap having your lunch in Jo’Burger. Do you find that sort of thing intrusive?
Not really. It sort of goes with the territory and if anything makes you behave a bit better in public!
Does it make it harder to have a relationship?
No. You obviously don’t want anything about your personal life getting in the papers - and unfortunately it does sometimes - but you never entertain it. If you were to comment or stick something up on Twitter it just makes it a bigger story.
You’ve 40.8K followers from just over a thousand tweets, which is a pretty good return! Do Leinster and Ireland have social media policies in place?
They do. It’s strict-ish - you can’t be coming out with ridiculous stuff. The guys from Leinster and Ireland keep a good eye on our Twitters and if you were to write something that was stupid or stir a lot of crap you’d get a phone call. But we’re not stupid; we know that a tweet can be turned into a front-page news story. We have a 24-hour pre- and post-game ban on tweeting, which stops you reacting in the heat of the moment to someone abusing you over your performance. If you break it you’ll get a fine.
You’ve all that lovely fresh unpasteurised Pilsner Urquell on tap, but are you allowed to drink during the season?
You can’t be telling adults “do this/don’t do that” all the time. Personally, I don’t go out much. Certainly not every weekend. If you play a big game on the Friday and the following week’s game isn’t until the Saturday then you might have a few pints because it’s an eight-day turnaround. Normally with me it’s a glass of wine and go for dinner. You need to have some sort of a social life.
There seemed to be a good bit of socialising when you went to Vegas in June with Rob, Fergus McFadden, Ian Madigan and Noel Reid.
What happens in Vegas, etc etc. I’d had three pretty bleak weeks at home on my couch after the operation, so I was dying to get out there. It was my first time being there and it was unbelievable; the best place ever. We went to Vegas for five nights and LA for a few days which did me a world of good mentally. I won a few bob too, so it was all good.
No donkey-related incidents?
Oh God, yeah, Georgia! I was there last year with the Emerging Ireland side and, to cut a long story short, ended up at an amusement park where it was 20 cent to get on a donkey. So Dominic Ryan had a go, which I took a picture off and tweeted. I think we’re all a bit too heavy for donkeys so we wouldn’t do it again. Georgia was a bit backwards; not the sort of place I’d go for my holidays, but playing there was a great experience.