“Every scrum, she’s throwing holy water at the tele” – Tadhg Furlong on his granny

You don't get more Irish than the Furlongs.

From farming in Campile to beating New Zealand with Ireland and the Lions before winning the country's third ever Grand Slam, it's been a heck of a few years for Tadhg Furlong. In his own words, he never set out to be a professional rugby player but, as a hurler, as a footballer and as a prop, he was just so talented and so ferocious that he was going to make it anyway. So the first phase of his rise culminated with a man of the match performance at Twickenham. He was the personification of a brick wall, basically going through a factory-like churn of rejecting advances on the grounds of physics and tossing whites shirts on their backs with machine-like efficiency. He was also the protagonist of the trick play that completely opened up the English, showing off all his skill and his graceful footwork to spin into a disguised passed that broke the line with jaw-dropping wonder. He did all that, then he just went back home. And, back there, it was the same as it always is around at his granny's - tea and rugby talk. But, appearing on The Late Late Show on Friday night, Tadhg Furlong forgot to bring along his two medals from the historic campaign. Why? He left them in his granny's.

"I got back to Wexford on Wednesday evening and went over to granny," the New Ross product explained on RTÉ. "Fanatical fan, granny, she is. I just gave her the two medals to hold on to, she might show a few of her little friends. "I called over today to pick them up and, two cups of tea later, I forgot them on her kitchen table. "So... I am sorry."

The story was better than the medals anyway and it allowed him to give more detail about the two grandmothers where this Irish monster came from. Granny in Wexford "She always has the Lourdes candle lighting beside the tele and every scrum that's on, she has the holy water out and she's actually throwing it at the tele just in case I get hurt." Granny in Cork "She was in hospital recently and she had the nurse in the hospital wheeling her around two floors trying to find a tele to watch the rugby match." No-one would've wanted to miss any second of Tadhg Furlong refusing to be pushed back even one step against the English. And two of the proudest grannies in Ireland certainly weren't going to either. https://twitter.com/RTErugby/status/977310012841238528