Throwing up but no lying down

FIFTEEN minutes prior to kick-off in the Heineken Cup pool three re-match between Toulouse and Connacht on Saturday, and the home scrum-half, Kieran Marmion, was throwing up along the side-line at the Sportsground.

Over 48-hours earlier, he was on a drip in a city hospital, one of a dozen Connacht players struck with a flu virus that spread through the squad on their return from a historic 16-14 triumph in the South of France.

When the 21-year-old man-of-the-match from the previous week, lumbered up to the captain’s run on Friday, just to get last minute instructions about tactics, he was pale, weak and hadn’t eaten for some time but was feeling better.

Frank Murphy was in line as a replacement, and Paul O’Donoghue, who was due to play with the Eagles in Bedford, was called up to the match-day squad as cover by Connacht head coach Pat Lam. Murphy and O’Donoghue, as it turned out, were too ill to tog. Marmion insisted he was okay to play.

The instructions from Lam were to go as long as he could and they’d switch one of the wingers, Fionn Carr or Matt Healy, to nine whenever he felt like he needed to be substituted. “About 15 minutes before kick-off, he throws up on the side of the field, we ask him: ‘Are you alright, do you want to pull out of this? He says ‘no, no, no I’m alright’ . . . And you look at the performance he pulled out for 80 minutes, that’s sensational stuff from a young lad,” recalls Lam.

It’s a few days on from the 37-9 defeat and Lam is reflecting on the individual bravery of Marmion and others as he looks ahead to the visit of the Dragons to College Road on Saturday (5pm). He’s frustrated with mistakes that gifted Toulouse points but thrilled with the character of the team in the face of adversity, against the backdrop of the flu disruption and playing against the giants of Toulouse, who rolled out the heavy-hitters for the revenge mission. The bravery of the ill players, shaken but not stirred, epitomises what it is to be a Connacht player, says Lam.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.