Heineken Cup

Brent Pope, Tom McGuirk and George Hook. Image: Cathal Noonan/INPHO. THE OLD MAN is in pain. Backache is a constant companion, with him when he falls ...

“I was never a good player,” he says modestly, before adding immodestly, “but was a very good coach. “There was an interesting duel there on RTÉ during the World Cup between Kenny Cunningham and Joseph Ndo, the Cameroonian League of Ireland player. That was largely why he was so watchable and largely why players and coaches got so irked by him. If that was the case, you wouldn’t be making much of an impact, would you?” He was 54 when he was plucked from nowhere to speak to the nation. “I was in constant debt. By the following year’s Five Nations, Hook appeared next to O’Herlihy in RTE’s studio, paid the princely sum of £25 to spend the afternoon as a pundit. So, by 1995, after taking the United States into the inaugural World Cup and Connacht to a few upset wins over Munster and Leinster, he was ready for the moment that would change his life. Instead Hook was in South Africa, lounging by the pool, accredited for the matches, bored silly, when RTÉ needed someone in an emergency to file a report from a Japan/New Zealand game, two rival teams in Ireland’s group. As a schoolboy he was a champion debater, as an adult he coached limited teams to do things they never knew they were capable of. What he did have, though, was an opinion and RTÉ were prepared to pay to hear it. It doesn’t seem fair – it isn’t fair – to be robbed of the mobility that once defined him.