It’s not often you get to play with one of your heroes growing up, but that’s exactly what happened to me.<\/p>\n
I joined CBC in Cork. I’d never played rugby. I was only learning the rudiments of the game, and one of the first matches I saw live on television was that famous 1973 Barbarians game against New Zealand.<\/p>\n
Fergus Slattery got an incredible try that day. The following year, you had the 1974 Lions tour to South Africa, captained by Willie John McBride. They were known as ‘the Invincibles’.<\/p>\n
Twenty two games on that tour and they’d won the first 21 of them. They won the series 3-0, but they drew with South Africa in the last game in the fourth test.<\/p>\n
Slattery was over the line, scored a try, but the referee disallowed it. If you had the TMO these days, I think they would have won 22 games unbeaten. He never said whether he grounded the ball or not.<\/p>\n
He was actually captain of Ireland in my first cap, so it was incredible to get in to play with him. I remember Moss Keane at the time. They were known as ‘Dad’s Army’, the pack, they were all well into their 30s.<\/p>\n
Moss used to say the only reason I got picked was to bring down the average age of the forwards.<\/p>\n
Slattery was a supreme athlete. He got a great kick out of training with the backs, so every time there was sprints, he’d join the wingers, and more often than not, he’d beat them in a sprint. That’s how good he was, he was at a different level.<\/p>\n
My first two coaches were Tom Kiernan and Willie John, who he would have played with. He spent more time with the coaches than he did with the players, but an outstanding player, a privilege to play with, and my sincere condolences to his wife Margot and his extended family.<\/p>\n
Leinster are on a mission of atonement after what happened in Bilbao. They certainly got back on the horse last week, 59-10 over the Lions in the quarter-final.<\/p>\n
Dan Sheehan is out, R\u00f3nan Kelleher is coming in, Tadhg Furlong is out. Another Lion, Thomas Clarkson, is coming in.<\/p>\n
Tommy O’Brien, probably their most consistent player all year. You had James Lowe come back last week.<\/p>\n
Sam Prendergast, who’s come under a lot of attention, I thought he was outstanding last week.<\/p>\n
On the flip side, Stormers are way better than the Lions, but they’re without their Springbok half-backs; Cobus Reinach and probably the best No. 10 in the world at the moment, Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu.<\/p>\n
So I think Leinster would win anyway, but that certainly swings the pendulum back in their direction. So I’m expecting Leinster to win that one.<\/p>\n
Donal Lenihan was speaking on Morning Ireland<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It’s not often you get to play with one of your heroes growing up, but that’s exactly what…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":484470,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-484469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=484469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484469\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/484470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=484469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=484469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}