Duggan fancies Ireland's chances

The legendary Willie Duggan will be at Twickenham tomorrow, evoking memories of a warm-up routine which consisted of a packet of fags and half a gallon of stout.

The daredevil Irishman is famous for many reasons, among them today's confession that he once emerged from the dressing room at HQ for an international while smoking a cigarette. Amid the clatter of studs and smell of embrocation, Duggan took one last drag.

'I was last out as usual and the referee was standing there in the corridor,' said Duggan. 'So just before I turned right into the tunnel and the television cameras, I said to him: "Hold that for me for a minute, will you?"

'I trotted on out and then the ref comes out holding my cigarette in his hand. Imagine that happening nowadays!'

Nobody will ever pull a stunt like that again, except in Duggan's case it wasn't a stunt, more a refusal to abort his routine pre-match intake of nicotine a second sooner than necessary. He would then be ready, having relaxed the night before in a pub in Kensington.

'What's the point of going to bed early if you can't sleep? Three or four pints of Guinness would make you sleep well and a few of us would nip round to the pub on the corner 50 yards from the hotel. The management knew about it, so it wasn't a case of sneaking off.'

Duggan was more than a hard-asnails No.8, more than the best of his generation who played 45 Tests for Ireland and the Lions during an era (1976-84) when there were no easy caps to be had against soft opponents. He was the patron saint of free spirits the rugby world over, with an aversion to training. A pure, 100 per cent iconoclast who never gave a monkey's for convention.

If Willie and the weed were separated only for 80 minutes on a Saturday afternoon, what about Willie and the warm-up?

'Ah, yes, I arrived in Blackrock once on a cold day for a match and one of the alickadoos was standing outside the dressing room when I pulled up.

'In a bit of a panic, he says: "Willie, you're late for the warmup.' So I says to him: "I'm warmed up nicely. I had the heater on in the car"!'

Duggan personified the old adage about Irish rugby, a parody of Churchill's famous quote in the dark days of 1941 that 'the position in England was serious but not hopeless'.

Over the years a host of Irish captains have got their excuses in first, claiming that the 'position in Ireland was always hopeless but, happily, never serious'.

Maybe, but they can't say that any more.

Ireland have never been more serious about winning than at Twickenham tomorrow. How ironic that the most reluctant of countries to abandon amateurism should be an object lesson in how to embrace professionalism without losing a fortune and flogging the players into early retirement.

The Irish Union makes the game pay, the players are employed by them and therefore never over-played, nor subjected to conflicting interests as in England. Last weekend, for example, while you-know-who was knocking seven bells out of Robbie Russell, the Irish put their feet up, en masse.

In the sanitised modern game, full of fitness gurus, dieticians, nutritionists, video analysts and regimented training, Duggan would have stood out like a sore thumb. Now 51, he is not among those who wishes professionalism had come 20 years earlier.

'Not in the slightest,' he said. 'We were serious about what we were doing but, essentially, we played for fun.

'To be honest, I never saw a reason why you should have to expend all your energy on the training field. It wasn't how you looked in training that mattered but what you did on a Saturday, so I made sure I practised my skills. No matter what job you do, if you are totally serious about everything you do, it becomes a chore. Same with professional rugby. The Lions were too serious. You have to have fun.'

Fun for Duggan along with fellow Lions Fergus Slattery, Ollie Campbell, John O'Driscoll and others from the Triple Crown team of 20 years ago covered a multitude of activities. One of the more celebrated resulted in Terry Kennedy, the talkative right wing, being dangled by his ankles out of a hotel window 17 floors up overlooking the seafront in Durban.

'I have to say I was there,' said Campbell, chuckling. 'John's party piece was to hang out of hotel windows and this particular night he decided to hang Terry out instead. You can imagine the consternation and then Willie Duggan, a genuinely hard man, walks into the room, sees Terry ' s predicament and says: "O'Dris-coll, you don't have the guts to let him go"!'

Duggan - 'There would be a grain of truth to that, all right' - expects to see something more important go out of the window tomorrow - England's unbeaten record at Twickenham.

'There's no logic to it but I have a gut feeling,' he said. 'We are going to win.'

This time, he won't need the referee to hold his cigarette. Ireland mean business.

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