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March 2004

Pitch for Success

Munich's ambitious rugby coach

It’s been said that the best thing you can take into a game of rugby is a hard head, and the best thing you can take out is a whole one. Irishman Rory Donoghue has never believed this. In his years as a stalwart member of the Munich Rugby Football Club’s (MRFC) backline, the thing he most wished for was tungsten-steel arms.

In 15 years as a player for the club, Donoghue has broken his arm four times. The first three times it was his left. The last time, just for variety, it was his right. That incident occurred in April last year and Donoghue, 37, finally took the hint—time to hang up the boots. “It was 20 minutes into the game and in the back of my mind I was just hoping to get through without getting hurt,” he recalls. “Curiously enough, it is exactly in those situations where you do get hurt. I knew the arm was broken as soon as it happened. I also knew that it [playing the game] was over. If you’re not prepared to put your body on the line any more, then step aside and let someone have a go who is.”

Although he has now “stepped aside,” the man who has embodied the heart of the MRFC for the last decade is continuing his association with the club as trainer. It is a voluntary position that he has held since 1990. Barring any board level coups, it is a job he plans to hold well into the future. “The rugby club has been good to me. It provided me with a circle of friends when I first arrived and that helped me adapt to Munich much more quickly than I otherwise would have. I met my girlfriend indirectly through the club (Maki, a Japanese citizen) and it provided me with a steady base of contacts throughout my time here. In fact, if the club did not exist, I doubt that I would have stayed in Munich as long as I have.”

Donoghue, then a fresh law graduate, arrived in Munich in 1988. Initially the visit was to learn German, but it soon extended after he obtained a position at Motorola in December 1990. He has now risen to the position of European Customer Service Manager and enjoys both the job and life in Munich. “Of course there are things I miss about Ireland, but then Munich is a great city,” he says. “And I’ve been here too long to think about returning. If I did, I know I’d just be pissed off with various aspects: the buses running late, the streets being dirty and so on. I suppose I’ve become a bit Germanic in my outlook after so many years here,” he laughs. Donoghue grew up in Blackrock, a middle-class area of Dublin, well known for Blackrock College, one of Ireland’s traditional rugby nurseries. Currently, five of the school’s alumni are members of the Irish national squad. Donoghue learned his rugby while at the college, but never excelled. Instead, after struggling in the college’s third and fourth teams, he played only intermittently while at university.

It was not until he came to Munich that he took the sport up again and, to his own surprise, found he was good at it. Suddenly, he possessed speed—a quality he had never been famous for in his school days. And, apart from a courageous style of play that left doctors in the crowd licking their lips in anticipation, he had also developed an astute ability to read the play. “You might put it down to the fact that the standard here was not as high as back home, but I don’t think it was that. Some people are simply late bloomers and I was one of them. When I went home, I watched games and realized I would have at least been able to hold my own if I played there,” Donoghue avers.

Although the MRFC was founded as late as 1977, rugby has a long tradition in Germany. Some of the oldest clubs in the world were established in Heidelberg and northern German cities shortly after the game was codified in 1871. Munich had four strong clubs in the 1920s, with the popularity of the sport peaking in 1925, when a team from FC Bayern won the German championship. Rugby was banned as a foreign sport in Germany under the National Socialists. After World War II, when Bavaria fell under American occupation, the game received little encouragement as opposed to, for example, baseball. In northern Germany, which was under British occupation, the game was fostered. The result was that when rugby was finally reintroduced to Munich, it was seen as a foreign game.

The lack of popularity of the code in southern Germany is one of the reasons why the teams in the southern half of the country have generally languished in the second Bundesliga. Although the MRFC has won the second Bundesliga twice, the only time it played in the first Bundesliga was in 2002/03, under the stewardship of Donoghue. It was, at best, a character-building experience. “To be frank, we got hammered,” recalls Donoghue. “But it was a great experience. There is a world of difference between the first and second Bundesliga. The pitches are a dream. You’re guaranteed the ref will turn up and it’s unlikely the games will be canceled at the last minute.” Donoghue is reluctant to slip into the role of an old-timer rugger bugger, who “the older they become the better they were.” He plans to concentrate on helping the club promote both the MRFC women’s team and on introducing the game to local schools. “In one of my trainer courses, the instructor posed the question, ‘What is the one factor that stopped you from becoming a better player?’ For me, the answer was that I was never properly trained. It was then that I fully realized the crucial role a trainer can play.”

Donoghue is now concerned with becoming the best trainer he can, so he can bring out the full ability of his charges, both young and old. “That’s where my pleasure in the game now lies. It’s great to see a young or new player come through and achieve things he himself wasn’t even aware he could do. That’s where I see my role in the future with the club, as well as gradually building up the team to have another crack at the first Bundesliga in two to three years.”

Further information on the Munich Rugby Football Club can be obtained at www.munich-rugby.de

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