Tales from the Members’ Bar

Volume 2 No 6 Paul Shields

Looking Forward to Sunday

Today I met with a man who is looking forward with some trepidation to playing against Mark Regan on Sunday. This has nothing to do with rugby, you understand, but this is the second of a potential five times that the two will face one another this season. The dread is that he gets a press call in a few weeks time to answer the same questions and the month after that, the same.

From sitting in while the local media did their bits of business, I can tell you that Shieldsy is sporting a black eye courtesy of Mark Easter – that happened in training in Wednesday. He enjoys the sort of confrontation he gets with “Ronnie” – he is a good scrummager, the Bristol line-out is useful with plenty of good targets. The way to get back at Regan’s in-your-ear antics is to focus on your own game and do your job well. If he cannot get under your skin to put you off, the whole tirade has been pointless and it reflects in his own play.

The local media were treated to a tutorial on scrummaging under the protocol of touching during the engage sequence – striving for an advantage over a twelve-inch gap is a might more tricky than you may think. Referees, apparently, remind scrum-halves about crooked feeds and it turns out that provided it goes into the tunnel, this particular hooker is not over-bothered by the precise blades of grass the ball travels. Amongst other things Paul reminded us of something Keith Wood said concerning the hooker’s role. One minute it is all blood and guts as you are striving to get the better of you opponent in the scrum the next you require the ice-cool precision of a sniper to put the ball on a sixpence.

The tutorial changed topics to lines-out and the assembled parties were told first hand that there is more to the line-out than the hooker’s throw and that if the “fast ball” were the be all and end all or even if it were as simple as it seems in the telling, all of our problems would be over. We know we need to improve, the line-out has been re-assembled this season and the new units are taking their time to bed in. We are better than we were and there is more improvement to come.

We were also told that Saints in pre-season had spent time discussing the ELVs and had come to the conclusion that the maul was not necessarily dead. The team were pleased with their work in the five minutes mauling that wound the clock down against Scarlets. It is only a matter of time before we see many of the trends, which seem to have arrived with the experimental laws, change in the light of experience.

Belfast Boy

As usual, I had used my search engine of choice to find out some background to Paul Shields. From that I managed to find out that Paul had attended the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. As a mere Vth former he played in the 1995 final of the Ulster Schools Cup. Inst won for the first time in more than 20 years in front of a St Patrick’s Day crowd of 12,000. I told him that I understand that there is a special rivalry between his old school and another in Belfast – Methodist College. Big rivals – nothing like it exists elsewhere, not in the east Midlands, Glasgow nor even Verona. Methody have won the Schools Cup thirty-one times, Inst twenty-nine. I did not have to prompt him for the numbers.

Discovering that Roger Wilson is another Old Instonian led on to a whole new topic but more of that later.

Paul had not really thought about professional rugby as a career. After all as a scholar and a student, the game was only just turning professional. He was happy at University and playing for Ballymena. In 1999 he was stewarding at Ravenhill with his face painted (as you do) when Ulster put paid to Stade Francais in the Heineken Cup semi-final. The next season a crisis amongst the local hooker population meant he was signed up and in the Ulster squad. A long association with his home province followed. It was another very proud day at Ravenhill in February 2007 when he and Neil Best took the field against the Dragons. The pair of them were each making their one-hundredth appearance for Ulster. Something that no-one will be able to take away from them; they were among the first ten men in history to be capped one hundred times by the province.

Paul’s international recognition was limited to only a couple of caps and was brought about by a curious set of circumstances. Uncle Fester, Shane Byrne and Frankie Sheehan were the recognised hookers for Ireland when Frankie (a good friend) was found to have a performance enhancing substance in his system. As an asthma sufferer, it was quite normal to take Salbutamol but apparently not normal enough to prevent him from being banned. In Kind Hearts and Coronets fashion, injury also intervened and Paul was in the green of Ireland for a World Cup qualifier against Italy. Injuries recovered, the ban was rescinded and Paul went on his way back to Ulster.

Northampton Saints

As we are aware, Paul is not the only Ulsterman in the Saints squad. Having joined at the start of last season, he was here to give that home-from-home feeling to two of the new recruits this season. Neil Best he knew from his Ulster days and Roger Wilson he had known since school – albeit Roger was a couple of years below him. Paul is glowing in his praise of his fellow Old Instonian. Solid and consistent were his first two words of description. It is not only his carrying of the football. He is everywhere that he is needed; in attack, in defence he is Mr Reliable. The hard work we see at the weekend is mirrored in his attitude to training. He is a top bloke.

I mentioned that I had recently come across the Opta Statistics that had Scott Gray riding high in the tackling charts along with Roger. Scott is another top bloke – and what a rollercoaster of a career; another man who puts in the hard work to get the results on Saturday.

I have decided I like Paul. He is straightforward, honest and a good word for all his colleagues. What about the hookers; the guys with whom you vie for a match day shirt? The club is in a very strong position with its hooking talent. Dylan has earned his recognition. Not only has he played well here at Saints but playing for the England XV against the Barbarians and for the Saxons against Ireland ‘A’, he showed that he has what is necessary to take the next step. If he did not have those qualities there is no way he would be in the current England squad with the prospect of being capped again against Australia and the potential to appear against South Africa and New Zealand, too. Such honours do not go to the undeserving.

Joe Gray is another impressive young man. He has had two years in England Under 20s and done well with the chances he has had in the senior Saints team. In terms of top level hookers, he is a very young man – he only turned twenty in the summer. He is a good player already and improving all the time. In a few years, Saints can look forward to having two of the best hookers in England.

So who are the real characters? Who are the guys that make us tick as a club? Every club should have a Chris Ashton. He is like a spaniel on too much sugar. Every day he does something that will have the squad in gales of laughter. It can be anything from the straightforwardly funny to the outrageously crazy. Life is never dull with Chris Ashton around. Paul told a story about Chris’s pride and joy – apart from his Wigan heritage – his car. It is a Fiat that has seen better days. Unbeknownst to him, a couple of team-mates decided to give it a paint job. It was Pimp My Ride on a budget – a credit crunch budget. Apart from the Made in Wigan logo to which Chris has become quite attached, (that may not be strictly true but he cannot get it off), there are two white go-faster stripes along the roof. The perpetrators thought they had done a job of which Arbarth would have been proud until they saw their handiwork in daylight. Revenge, they say, is a dish best served cold. To see how Chris took his revenge, scan the players’ cars for fluorescent pink wheels and, because he thought he was being interrupted and hid, a bright pink exhaust pipe.

Nacho is a man who does not need a surname. He is already a legend, a great character and a true leader on the pitch. With Nacho, there are no wasted words and no clichés. When Nacho speaks everyone listens; everyone acknowledges he was right and wonders whether he was looking at them when he said it. It is not necessarily that Nacho is Argentinean that singles him out for special attention but, like one or two others, he is mad keen on football. More than that, he is a mad keen Boca Juniors fan. Probably the only rivalry in professional sport that comes close to the schools in Belfast is that between Boca Juniors and River Plate. Would anyone like to guess who taped “River Plate” across the front of Nacho’s Boca shirt in the changing room the other day? If you need a clue, he has a smart car with a couple of white speed stripes.

Thank you for being patient. We are coming to our regular feature the much-anticipated biscuit question. Paul likes them all. He does not have them in the house, of course, but if you were to offer him a choice, he would be keeping an eye out for HobNobs or chocolate digestives. If truth were told and he was after a sweet fix, he would not waste time with the biscuit but dive straight for the Dairy Milk. In the other great debate he hates Marmite (and Vegemite, if it comes to it). He returned to training in the summer and found that he was underweight. On taking advice from the conditioning team on what was best to eat to put on the right sort of pounds he was told toast with a bit of Vegemite. His heart sank. “Come on, Shields. Man up! You can do it.” Two jars of Vegemite were bought. Toast was made and spread with it. A bite was taken, a mouthful was spat out and the Vegemite is now at the back of the cupboard and will still be there when the house is bought and sold.

For the coaching tip we return to a familiar theme. Practice makes permanent so when you practise, give it your all.

arw

13.11.2008

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