Sean O’Brien is enjoying coaching with Leinster more than ever.
When he played for Leinster and Ireland, his coaches used to plead with him to do less. How about not trekking home to the farm in Tullow when he might have been resting and recovering in Dublin? What about saying no to the requests to come and coach youths teams the evening after his own sessions?
O’Brien has stepped back from the senior team this season and is now working mainly with Tullow’s U18s in a bid to make sure the club has a pipeline of young players feeding into the men’s side. “I suppose when you first go into something, you’ve a lot of figuring out to do. I’m really enjoying it at the minute, that’s one thing I’d have said – that if I wasn’t enjoying it or adding value to the set-up… well, one, Leo wouldn’t have me here and the second thing would be that I’d be codding myself.
O’Brien played at the highest level, starring for Leinster, Ireland, and the Lions, but he had never considered the bigger picture. Now he appreciates what it takes to manage a group of 60 players. He understands the hours that go into giving a team the right info, with Leinster analysts Brian Colclough and Juliette Fortune a big help in improving O’Brien’s video work.
“Jacques is obviously over the defensive side of things, so there would be a lot of correspondence with him on different aspects of the D part of it. As Johnny Sexton reminded us recently in his book, he was the one pure ‘red’ – assertive, strong-willed, driven, highly competitive. The only other person who had a genuine foot in the red camp was O’Brien.
“The rest of the week, early in the week, you’d try to be in the blue. On Thursday, you’d be hitting a peak and maybe lighting that fire of making sure we’d all be ready to rock, you get a bit of a spike in your training. When he and Sexton were breaking into the Leinster squad as players, it was a place full of red personalities. There were big characters throughout the dressing room, plenty of people who would speak up without hesitation.
“We know it’s a happy, good environment where lads could express themselves, I don’t think there’s much… you go back 10 years ago, how many fights there were in training, there’d have been an awful amount in all the provinces. “So, if I was developing or having a chat with a 15 or 16-year-old now, if they can express themselves in terms of their voice it would be brilliant for them down the road in terms of coming into a professional environment.
The early years of O’Brien’s playing days with Leinster were a whirlwind of success. He was part of the wider set-up when they won their first Heineken Cup in 2009, then a star of the 2011 and 2012 triumphs.
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