‘I always had massive doubts about myself’: Peter O’Mahony on Munster and the aftermath

In the first year of the pandemic, when having more time to think rotovated unexpected thoughts, Peter O’Mahony reflected on his leadership of the Munster dressingroom. How others saw him, how he made them feel. It was a short journey of self-discovery. One slow lap of his conscience. He didn’t seek counsel: as soon as he asked himself, he knew the answers.“To put it simply, I would put a huge weight on somebody’s rugby ability,” O’Mahony writes in All In, his superb new autobiography, “and if I felt they weren’t of the right standard I didn’t want to know about them. I wouldn’t give them the time of day if I didn’t think they had the ability to make it at Munster. And once I came to that conclusion about them, it was done ... not good enough for Munster and not good enough for me.”Once O’Mahony reached this epiphany, he had no desire to suppress it. The whole point was openness. So he organised a Zoom meeting for the Munster players without any coaches on the call. He spoke for the first 10 or 15 minutes, confessing the faults of his captaincy. When he finished other people spoke, but nobody gave it to him between the eyes. He had walked out with his hands up.“I had been very open myself [on the call],” O’Mahony says, “so there probably wasn’t much left unturned. I went through a lot of it myself in front of everyone. The thing I’d always underwrite it with is that I always had Munster at heart. Even though I was being a bit of a b****cks or I was pressurising people, I always wanted the club to do well. There was never any personal nastiness.READ MORE“Andy [Farrell came in, with Ireland] and he changed my outlook on the game and, you know, what it looked like to be a leader. The game was changing and I kind of wasn’t. When he came in it opened my eyes up a bit. There was stuff that I shouldn’t have done – the pressure I was putting on people and the way I was treating them as a result. “For the later part of my career in Munster, you know, I kind of let the curtains down a bit and became more open to everybody in the squad. Not that it was a difficult thing to do – when I realised it, I knew I had to do it.”“It was very different when I started. In rugby, being vulnerable would have been seen as a sign of weakness.”Peter O'Mahony, seen here with Andy Farrell at the 2023 Rugby World Cup, prospered for the guts of 15 years in a cut-throat business. Photograph: Dan Sheridan/INPHO Early in the book O’Mahony quotes a press conference line from Johnny Sexton, just before O’Mahony won his 100th cap at the 2023 World Cup. “I don’t think you guys get to see the real Peter O’Mahony,” Sexton said. Throughout his career O’Mahony had often sat behind those microphones, peddling banalities in the line of duty. When the occasion demanded, O’Mahony was a master of stony-faced deflection. In his mind, the O’Mahony that Sexton referred to was none of our business.“I was probably a bit of a closed book for a long time,” he says, “which is the way I felt I had to be I suppose.”In sports autobiographies there is no such thing as full disclosure, but there is a threshold that must be met for a book to have substance and character. O’Mahony grasped that. And because he had been hidden in plain sight for so long the pages were a blank canvas. In the skilful hands of the journalist and podcaster Dion Fanning, everything about it is authentic and compelling.Nothing about O’Mahony’s stardom was inevitable. When he flapped his wings, he didn’t suddenly take flight. “I always had massive doubts about myself,” he writes.[ Peter O’Mahony: ‘It is logical to have Ronan O’Gara as a candidate for the Leinster job’ ]He tells a story of a meeting in the Munster Academy from early in his career. There were about 20 young players in the room, and the message was that if two of them played in the Heineken Cup for Munster and one of them played for Ireland it would be a brilliant outcome. Conor Murray and Simon Zebo were in that meeting along with others who had tall reputations.“If I felt my chances were slim before that,” he writes, “I listened to that message and felt that slim had just left town. I knew how much talent was there [in the room]. I didn’t have that level of talent no matter what way I looked at it.”Peter O'Mahony: 'Work on the stuff you’re very good at because that’s the reason you’re picked' But if that were the case, how could he have captained Munster, Ireland and the British and Irish Lions and prospered for the guts of 15 years in a cut-throat business? Alex Ferguson said hard work was a talent; for O’Mahony that was the foundation stone.“I had some talents,” he says, “but I came up against way more talented people in my career. Some of my talents I worked very hard at. I think Paul [O’Connell] put it a good way, he said, ‘Corner the market’. In the end there were a few things I was best in the world at, but that was down to hard work and nurturing a slight talent I had.“I would consider myself best in the world, or certainly competitive to be the best in the world, at my set piece: lineout, scrum, maul, maul defence, kick-off receipt. That kind of stuff. I was up there with the best of them, but I used to spend a lot of time working on them. Kids will always ask me what they should work on. I always say work on the stuff you’re very good at because that’s the reason you’re picked.”He developed a close relationship with O’Connell, first as a mentor and then as a friend. But when he first entered the Munster dressingroom there was no shelter for rookies and no allowances. Most of the players who had won two Heineken Cups with Munster were still part of the group and were set in their ways.[ Munster’s Clayton McMillan: ‘There were a few things that I would have had a strong opinion on’ ]In those days, the Munster dressingroom had the dynamics of a school playground. Every weakness was preyed upon. Humour and cruelty had a symbiotic relationship.“I was always quite serious, so I used to get the piss taken out of me the whole time. But that was always a good sign in Munster. The day they stop taking the piss out of you, you may as well head out the door. “But, I mean, there were days when I was like, ‘I’m going to have to slap the head off this fella’, because what they were saying was unbelievably disrespectful. There was no badness in it, but if you rose to it you were getting it for the next six weeks.”Peter O'Mahony, second right, with Keith Earls, Conor Murray and Stephen Archer after Munster won the United Rugby Championship (URC) in 2023 by beating Stormers. Photograph: James Crombie/INPHO It was a much different environment to the one he left 14 months ago. In the span of his career, Munster went from perennial contenders in the Heineken Cup to also-rans. On the field and off the field they lost critical altitude. The players who slagged him to within an inch of his life were the faces who smiled out from posters on his bedroom wall. “They had it all,” he writes, “and I wanted everything they had.”Over time, though, the chances of such glory descended into oblivion. “The problem is: are we producing the same quality of player? You know, you’d imagine over the next few years we’ll be hit hard by the way the Limerick hurlers have gone. Naturally, school kids in Limerick will want to play hurling because they see success.“I’m very conscious that rugby is in a strange place at the moment in general. It needs support. It needs financial support. It needs sponsorship. Munster probably above all need help in that way. “But I felt at times we weren’t clever about the way we were going about things. You look at good businesses; you need to spend money to get money back. I felt we got to a point where we were cutting budgets in places we shouldn’t have been.“Like, you know, there were days when we had to row about the quality of the food. I remember a conversation we had where they said, ‘Oh, we can feed the senior team but not the academy lads’. And I’m saying, if there’s anybody in the building that needs to be fed it’s them – they’re on the lowest money, they’re growing, do you know what I mean.”He is convinced still about the magnetism of the jersey. He entered a dressingroom that was full of players who never left it and, just like him, never considered playing for anybody else. In O’Mahony’s time, there were others of like mind: Murray, Keith Earls, Billy Holland, Dave Kilcoyne, Stephen Archer, the Scannell brothers. At the core of their group was the heart of something.“We always felt we were close. There was always a strong sense of community. I always felt there was something different [about Munster]. But it took me a while to realise, ‘We need to change our goalposts a little bit’. When I came in, the European Cup was everything, but there came a point – and it was a tough thing to say – ‘Look, lads, we need to concentrate on the domestic league here and try to win that’. It was hard for me to concede something like that.In All In, Peter O'Mahony recalls when Graham Rowntree, above left, tried to tell him his contract would not be renewed. Photograph: Ben Brady/INPHO “But winning the URC in ’23, in the style that we did, going away from home for six weeks, spending a month in South Africa makes me very proud. I didn’t have a trophy to show for my captaincy [until then]. It gives me great peace of mind at night that we did it.”In professional sport, endings are rarely clean or kind. Everybody is essential until they’re not. “I would read about the brutal corporate culture at US companies,” he writes, “where people go into work knowing every day could be their last and think, ‘Welcome to professional sport, kid’.”In the dedication at the beginning of the book, he thanks his parents and his grandmother, Maura Conroy, for teaching him “the value of loyalty”. In O’Mahony’s game, what was that worth? In the last chapter of his Munster career, he was no longer on a centralised IRFU contract, and his body was pummelled from years of being camped on the gain line and the front line. Munster wanted to let him go before he was prepared to finish.There is a jarring scene in the book where Graham Rowntree, the Munster coach at the time, tried to tell O’Mahony that his contract wouldn’t be renewed for the following season and that he would thank him in the long run. O’Mahony argued his case until eventually Rowntree fired a pen across the room and asked O’Mahony to pick it up. Immediately, Rowntree realised that his soap opera theatrics had crossed a boundary and he tried to row back. The stand-off about O’Mahony’s contract extension, though, continued for months until at last he signed for one more season.“I knew at the end of the day you’re a number in the squad. They need guys who are fit. You also know when you’re coming to a certain age [he retired at 35] that the end is not far away. So, I knew that.“But, at the same time, I was from the area and I had given what I could of my body and myself to the game for them. It was the first time it kind of came back around to them to look after me. I just felt, with everything I’d given, I felt a little bit put out by the manner it was done.“I don’t know was it disloyalty? The problem with the whole thing is it was so disjointed that I couldn’t get a straight answer from anyone. There was none of it adding up to me. Rightly or wrongly, I felt I deserved a bit better for what I had done for the club, and that’s probably wrong of me. I should have known better. But at the same time, I wasn’t someone who had just rocked up. I cared for the place. Does that stand for something?”It was what he stood for. All in.All In (Sandycove, €24.99) is out now. Cork Opera House is hosting an evening with Peter O’Mahony on Monday. Tickets are available here