The making of an international: The rise and rise of Tadhg Furlong

On the Monday after Ireland played Australia last November, Aidan O’Brien left his office and bumped into a familiar figure.

O’Brien is deputy principal at Good Counsel in New Ross and the last person he expected to see on the school grounds that morning was Tadhg Furlong.

But Furlong had something he wanted to deliver. Last Monday, O’Brien reached into a drawer at his desk and removed the gift Furlong had brought with him.

“I was walking out that door on the Monday and just as I was going around the corner, Tadhg comes towards me in a tracksuit and an old t-shirt and goes, ‘Here Aidan, just came in to give you that’."

Furlong thrust into O’Brien’s hand one of his Ireland jerseys from Soldier Field. Having delivered this memento from the victory over the All Blacks, Furlong would have been happy going on his way.

Nobody had known he was coming and it was clear that Furlong preferred that.

“It was lunch hour so I held on to him, so we went out and just strolled and obviously lots of the kids saw him around and took a few photographs and so on, but the perspiration was rolling off his forehead and it wasn’t because of the warm climate or anything. He felt, I would say, self-conscious.

“He would have been happy to come in and give us that jersey and just get out of here and I think I probably put him under a bit of pressure by making him hang around and meet the fellas. His modesty would be such that he would have no problem doing it and he would love to do it, but there was a degree of discomfort in it.”

Furlong is one of the many past pupils they’re proud of at Good Counsel, but then the school is important to him.

Furlong’s Six Nations begins next weekend but there is another prize on offer, which many believe he will achieve if he can stay free of injury. They haven’t produced any Lions in New Ross Rugby Club, but most good judges believe Furlong will be part of that trip if he remains fit.

His rise has been exceptional and swift. He may have made his first start for Ireland on last summer’s tour to South Africa, but the autumn games changed everything.

It hasn’t surprised those who have known him since he was a young boy, heading to New Ross to watch his father play rugby or when was part of a victorious underage Wexford hurling side.

As Furlong has progressed, these places have remained a constant. Campile is his lodestar, the place he returns to whenever he can, even as he takes another step on his astonishing ascent.

Furlong was shaped on the family farm in Campile, at Horeswood GAA club, New Ross Rugby Club and at school in Good Counsel.

He has captured the public imagination thanks to the freewheeling nature of his performances in Chicago and in the autumn internationals in Dublin, but the underlying reasons for his rise are sound and reveal something about the changing style of rugby.

“We have a lot of good footballers playing now,” says Marcus Horan, who came up against Furlong in a game against Clontarf a couple of years ago, “whereas before we had rugby players.” When Furlong played against Horan, Furlong came away from the game thinking he had done ok and taking confidence from it. 

Furlong’s role as a tighthead prop demands control of the scrum, but he has other elements to his game as well. “‘1’or ‘3’ traditionally was a scrummager,” Horan adds, “but there are really good footballers around now. Tadhg also backs it up with his scrummaging.”

He has backed it up and Ireland need him. Good tightheads are like "hen's teeth", Horan says, but now Ireland look they have found one. Maybe in the last place they would have looked.

Furlong has said he was a rugby player when he played Gaelic games, but his size even as a young player disguised the fact that he had fine handling and football skills. “I’ve had props the same size, but I wouldn’t trust them to catch a ball,” says Tony Brazil, who coached Furlong as he developed at New Ross.

These skills may have evolved playing hurling and football, but wherever Furlong has gone, he has shown an ability to absorb information quickly and a gift to relay it to others.

“When he was playing for underage representative sides, we used to ask him when he came back what drills they were using,” Brazil recalls.

“He would have been learning drills at a higher level than I would have been coaching. He was always good at delivering the message too and he’d almost act as a coach himself in those situations.”

Hugh Coffey was Furlong’s Technology teacher. Before the game in Soldier Field, he sent him a text wishing him well. Furlong replied quickly. Afterwards, Coffey sent another congratulating him. He didn't expect to receive a reply, but he wanted to congratulate a former pupil. Within 40 minutes of the game ending, he got a response which captured the mood of a nation: "Unreal, Hugh, unreal.”

Furlong was more than just a sporting star at Good Counsel. When he returned in November, Coffey asked him to pop into to the Technology department before he left and he showed him around the new classrooms.

Furlong got an excellent Leaving Cert, including A1s in Technology and DCG.

“I still use his DCG project as an example of how everything should be laid out,” his teacher in that subject Seamus Walsh says. “It was a handheld device so your phone would slot into it and it was in the shape of goals.”

But Tadhg’s sporting obsession didn’t begin at Good Counsel. Before school, before Horeswood and before New Ross, there was his father James.

“I had the dubious distinction of coaching him,” says Brazil, laughing.

James Furlong was “old school”, Brazil says. He was a prop who was less interested in displaying advanced footballing skills than making his presence felt on the field through, er, more traditional methods.

Wherever New Ross played, it was no shock to find James Furlong in the middle of some tussle when things got scrappy as they usually did. Those games in Tullow or Birr or some other Midlands town would be punctuated by Brazil’s cry, “Furlong, was that you again?” He knew the answer before he'd asked the question.

Furlong senior played rugby in the days when a prop was required to understand the black arts. “He wouldn’t take a step back,” Brazil says of the father. But it wasn’t long before James Furlong started bringing his son along to New Ross and they realised they had a different proposition.

The men who coached Tadhg as he grew up - John Keenan, Andy Maher and Sammy Bennett among them - recognised his talent. “Technically he was at a different level,” Brazil remembers.

It was clear that rugby would be his sport and in his old school, rugby has mixed fortunes, even if it is seen as complementary rather than a rival to their traditional sports.

Good Counsel has always been proud of its sporting achievements. On the same weekend last November, the school could look across the globe and spot a number of past pupils excelling. On Friday, Walter Walsh was named as an All-Star. On Saturday, Furlong lined up for Ireland in Chicago against the All Blacks. A thousand miles away, Kevin Doyle was playing for Colorado Rapids in the second leg of their MLS play-off game against La Galaxy. Further west, in Santa Anita Park, Aidan O’Brien was triumphing in the Breeders’ Cup. On the Sunday, Greg Bolger lined up for Cork City in the FAI Cup final in Dublin.

So Furlong isn’t alone in excelling and coming from Good Counsel. Its position on the Wexford-Kilkenny border means it attracts a number of pupils from both counties and there is now a fixture called the Madigan Cup to remember two brothers, both past pupils, who tragically died.

Furlong might have played in that, O’Brien can’t be sure, but he absorbed the atmosphere of the school as he continued his sporting development.

It is that kind of place. O’Brien bumped into James Furlong recently and asked him about his other son, Eoin, rather than talking about Tadhg. Eoin Furlong’s passion is music. He is an accomplished banjo player and possesses the same modesty and character as his brother.

Those qualities are what stand out to those who watched him grow up.

Denis Cadogan’s wife filmed the famous video of Tadhg Furlong playing Gaelic Football. Denis couldn’t film it because, as he says himself, he tends to get a bit caught up in the matches when Horeswood are playing.

https://twitter.com/SportsJOEdotie/status/648184306012131328

As he sits in his home in Campile, he goes through the scrapbooks, recalling games and incidents involving Tadhg. He remembers a game when Furlong was put on a star forward who was causing problems. Immediately the forward flicked the sliotar over Furlong's head with a hurl and went to run round Tadhg to collect it on the other side. Of course, this was easier imagined than done, and he wasn’t the first or last person to realise the difficulty in executing that move. “He wasn’t a dirty player, but by God he was physical.”

Furlong was part of an U-14 Wexford hurling side, playing full-back, that won the Tony Forristal Cup and he was devoted to those games as he was to everything he was involved in.

Cadogan says he has no stories about Tadhg Furlong because nobody can recall him every stepping out of line. Sure, he could be cheeky, but the attitude, “the good character”, as Aidan O’Brien calls it, was always the constant in the Furlong family.

Cadogan was a teacher in the local primary school and the most salacious gossip he can provide is that Furlong was “very good at maths”.

At Horeswood, he played on one team which wasn’t the best, but Tadhg never quit. “He‘d give it his all and he’d never let up , he’d never stop and never complain. He had a marvellous attitude,” Cadogan says.

That has also remained a constant. “We all thought he’d get there, but not this fast,” Brazil says.

There is a long way to go. Furlong’s performances in the autumn have marked him out for advancement, but Marcus Horan knows the experienced players in the Irish team as well as Joe Schmidt himself, will be reminding Furlong how quickly things can changed.

“Rory Best will be telling these lads that the Six Nations is a different battlefield, whatever happened in the autumn.”

Players and teams can appear in the new year with targets on their backs. Horan points to England’s 2016 as something that will have made others want to take them down.

Furlong’s team-mates will remind him of what is to come, but he may not need to be told of his priorities.

A couple of weeks ago, Good Counsel were playing CUS in Donnybrook. As they warmed up on the back pitch, a familiar figure appeared again. "Go on the Counsel!" Tadhg Furlong roared as the players ran into the dressing room before the game. He went in to talk to the Good Counsel team to explain he wouldn't be able to stay, but he wanted to wish them luck.

"The very fact that he would take the trouble to come over to Donnybrook, out of his way and again unannounced gave everybody a tremendous lift," O'Brien says. But then it doesn't come as a surprise. Nobody knows how far Tadhg Furlong will go, but everybody will know where he came from.