February 11th, 2007 is a day for which we all remember Paul O'Connell. Though Ireland lost to France at Croke Park - their first game at the home of GAA - O'Connell produced one of his most memorable moments. It did not happen on the pitch, it happened in the team dressing room
Nearly four months later, fans got a chance to step behind closed doors and have the opportunity to watch the type of interaction between players which, normally, we do not have the privilege of viewing.
Fifteen years ago today, Paul O'Connell issued one of Ireland's most memorable war cries in the Croke Park dressing room.pic.twitter.com/2zaF3bUBHK
— Balls.ie (@ballsdotie) February 11, 2022
O'Connell's pre-match speech in which he called for 'manic aggression' and for teammates to put the 'fear of God' into the French has been written into rugby legend. It featured in an RTÉ documentary about Ireland's 2007 Six Nations Championship titled 'Reaching For Glory'.
15 years to the day since that game took place, it still has quite the ring to it.
It is, however, something O'Connell wishes we had never seen.
In his book, The Battle, released back in 2016, O'Connell says that he feels that moment gave people an unrealistic view of him as a person and that those 40 or so seconds should not have been for public consumption.
There was a caricature of me: that psycho guy, over-competitive bordering on insane, every hour of the day. And there were stories to back up the impression that some people had - or maybe still have - about my personality: like nobody will play me at Monopoly because I ruin everything by being too desperate to win.
Maybe, like a lot of things, it was partly true. But I heard it so often that sometimes, when I just wanted to knock a bit of craic out of some game, I started questioning myself.
Am I losing my competitive instinct?
Am I not being myself here?I know a lot of people's impressions of my character came from what they saw of me in the dressing room at Croke Park in 2007, just before we played France in the Six Nations — the clip from the documentary where I was going on about `manic aggression', about putting `the fear of God' into someone.
It was a good documentary, and people loved it, but it bugged me that I was never asked about the use of that clip, because it's not something I would have agreed to. It's just too intimate for people to be sitting down with a cup of tea and a biscuit watching it. It shouldn't be for that kind of consumption.
That was me for half an hour before a rugby match, nearly ten years ago. It's very different to how I was — and how we all were — in my later years with Ireland, but it's probably what some people thought I was like all the time.
That reputation has certainly stuck with O'Connell down through the years, even if he says it did encapsulate his entire career in one short clip.
Regardless, you still get chills watching it.
Picture Credit: Matt Browne / SPORTSFILE
SEE ALSO: Ronan O'Gara Sums Up The Massive Contrasts In The Attacks Of Ireland & France
