When the chips are down, it’s guys like these Real McCoy’s you’d want to turn to on the rugby field. Hell, one of them even played on after suffering a torn scrotum on the field of play.
Willie John McBride
Like John Hayes, McBride was from farming stock and came late to rugby, but also like the Bull, a late start proved to be absolutely no hindrance to McBride having a sterling career in the game.
McBride captained Ireland 11 times in his 63 caps and was also present on five Lions tours stretching from 1962-1974. He captained the Lions on their most successful ever tour in 1974, when they stood up to a Springbok side renowned for taking no prisoners and beat them 3-0 on their own turf.
Central to the Lions’ strategy was meeting South African fire with some of their own and nobody embodied that approach more than Antrim man McBride. He invented the now infamous ’99’ call, which basically meant that if any Lion was in trouble, his 14 teammates would pile in and exact retribution on the nearest Springbok they could find.
It was a strategy that produced quite effective results, as is evident in the video below. McBride is the man wearing number four and the trademark headband.
Wayne ‘Buck’ Shelford
Hardness on a rugby field can be defined in many ways, but if it means playing on after your scrotum is torn and one of your testicles is hanging out, then Wayne ‘Buck’ Shelford is your man.
That’s the squeamish situation ‘Buck’ found himself in during the infamous ‘Battle of Nantes’ against France in 1986 when a French player raked his studs along Shelford’s nether regions, in the process causing possibly the most gruesome injury imaginable on a sports field.
Most right-thinking males would have been off to the hospital in an attempt to preserve their manhood, but not Buck. He ordered what must have been a baffled All-Black doctor to stitch it up so he could carry on and carry on he did as the All-Blacks fell to a 16-3 defeat, Shelford’s only loss in a 22-game international career.
“I was knocked out cold, lost a few teeth and had a few stitches down below,” he said years later. “It’s a game I still can’t remember – I have no memory of it whatsoever.”
If only the same was true for the poor fans watching on television, eh Buck?
Manu Tuilagi
OK, so he might play for our most bitter rivals and is fond of leaping off ferries from time to time, but Tuilagi is undoubtedly an absolute beast. 6’1″ and nearly 18 stone, the Leicester Tigers centre also has frightening pace and is nigh on unstoppable when he gets up a head of steam.
All that is largely irrelevant here, however, as our primary motivation for including Tuilagi in this piece was so we could have yet another excuse to include a video of him absolutely boxing the head off Chris Ashton. It never, ever gets old.
Serge Betsen
Forget Sebastian Chabal who was regarded as a hard man for his frightful appearance as much as anything else, Serge Betsen was the real tough guy of French rugby over the last decade or so.
Known as ‘Le Sécateur’, which translates roughly as ‘The Grim Reaper’, Betsen tackled anything that moved on the pitch and the scars running down his cheeks were an illustration that he wasn’t afraid to put his head in places where others wouldn’t put their big toe.
Paul O’Connell
We flirted with the idea of giving Sean O’Brien a mention, but the Tullow tank has a long way to go before achieving the cult status of his international colleague. There are others who might come across as tougher than the ginger giant or enjoy greater renown for memorable escapades on the pitch (see Buck Shelford above), but above anyone, O’Connell is the man that Munster and Ireland have looked to when the chips are down over the years.
It is hard to think of a player in modern times who commands more universal respect than O’Connell does from his peers and if motivational speeches are your thing, does anything top the famed ‘manic aggression’ rallying call from a few years back? Legend.
JOE’s Real McCoy’s are brought to you in association with McCoy’s Crisps, who are bringing McCoy’s Premier League Darts to Dublin for the first time this Thursday. That’s right, Phil Taylor, Adrian Lewis and the lads in Dublin’s Fair City. (No, not Fair City, Dublin’s Fair Ci… ah, forget it.)
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