An impressionable 19-year-old surrounded by hardened rugby folk – sounds like a recipe for disaster.
November 2006 and teenage winger Luke Fitzgerald is called into Eddie O’Sullivan’s Ireland squad.
The Blackrock and Leinster talent scores a try in an ‘A’ team defeat to Australia, at Ravenhill, and does enough to be named in the senior team. His test debut will be against the Pacific Islands [the best of Tonga and Fiji].
Fitzgerald can recall so many details of that day and, thanks to a wise intervention, he can recall the evening after too. “I remember getting called into camp,” he told us.
I had an inkling I was going to get something. It was against Pacific Islands and the team had been playing relatively well, so there was no pressure on the coach in terms of having to get a result against them, or having to have a good result.
“I think he was a bit of a fan of mine, Eddie, and he obviously stuck me in and gave me a chance. I had a feeling he might do it just because of the situation and the climate at the time was there that he could take a chance and have a look at someone. He took a look at Paddy Wallace at 10 that day as well. He had a great game.”
‘It was a real exciting period,’ Fitzgerald adds. I’d just come out of school and obviously I was really ambitious. I trained really hard all that summer, I mean I put on about 10 kilos, so it was everything happening really quickly for me.
“The training was great, I love all that stuff anyway. It was a really exciting period. What I remember was the name getting read out at the meeting. I had an idea and I was thinking, ‘Eddie picked me on the right wing’ and I was much more comfortable on the other side.”
Fitzgerald appeared alongside fellow debutants Stephen Ferris and Jamie Heaslip. Paddy Wallace, who scored 26 points, was named man-of-the-match. Ireland won 61-17, then the fun really began.
In 2006, the Irish team still went by a much-cherished initiation routine for new players. The player in question was to drink whatever his senior colleague ordered for the two of them. Fitzgerald reveals to dodged the rite of passage.
“Jim McShane [Ireland’s team doctor], in fairness, was a life saver that day. He said, “Listen, it looks like he got a bit of a knock on the head, he better head home early.”
“I hadn’t got a knock on the head, he just was saving me because it was looking pretty intense! It was my first experience, although I’d some experience training with Leinster, but there was some big boys there and they’d be well able for their shenanigans.
“I was only a young kid, so he saw an opportunity to save me and he did. I was forever thankful for avoiding probably the worst hangover of all time.”
Close call.
Fitzgerald would go on to play 31 Tests for Ireland as well as making 141 Leinster appearances before injury cut his career short, aged 28, after suffering a neck injury in the 2016 PRO12 final.
*Updated from story originally posted in May 2015.
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