This season was the campaign where Calvin Nash finally got the opportunity to become the player he always looked like he could be.
I’ve told this story before but five years ago I was doing a bit of content for Mr Binman in Thomond Park so I got the train up from Cork. There was a dinner beforehand with Munster’s marketing department and Mr Binman’s people. Naturally, we were all talking about rugby and the topic fell to prospects for the future. I said Gavin Coombes was one to watch – and he was – but the Munster stadium manager at the time said that the guy to watch was Calvin Nash.
Nash had a big – and well-earned – reputation that he earned in the Munster Senior Cup for Crescent College Comprehensive and the expectation was that he’d follow the path worn by Keith Earls before him. Seriously – Nash was that good at school level as a devastating Slashing Strike Runner in the #13 jersey that I was hearing about this guy while I was living in Italy.
He scored a pair of tries in the 2014 Munster Senior Cup against Pres that would be good enough to win any game and his performance in that game was such that his coach, Conan Doyle, singled him out specifically after the game.
“The difference today was young Calvin coming through, he’s probably the youngest guy in the team and it was an outstanding performance, he was the difference between the teams essentially because there wasn’t anything to separate the sides.”
The assumption was that Nash would waltz into the Munster Academy and… he did just that in the summer of 2016. Well, not waltz, but I’ll put it like this – he was the easiest addition any academy coach could make at the time, especially as a then midfielder which was (and is) an area of need for Munster.
Nash would go on to play in the same Irish u20 side as Caelan Doris, Fineen Wycherley, Ciaran Frawley and Gavin Coombes in the u20 Six Nations of 2017 even captaining the side on three occasions before going on to be a standout player for Ireland in a fairly poor u20 World Championship campaign for Ireland that summer.
Nash even managed to make his pro debut in his first year of the academy in 2016/17 – quite a big deal at the time – but for a few reasons things never really kicked on like you’d expect.
Some of that was due to a succession of badly timed knocks and niggles that took him out of the key games that he needed to show up in. Young players – young wingers, in particular – are usually ready for pro-rugby quicker than other positions. The wider spaces can be kinder to younger players so coaches are, again, generally predisposed to giving them opportunities earlier. It is the ultimate young man’s game.
Louis Rees Zammit and George North made their professional debuts at 18 and then kept scaling through the levels. Cheslin Kolbe made his debut at 19 and cemented himself as a starter for the Stormers inside a season. Jordan Larmour, Calvin Nash’s u20 contemporary, made 22 pro appearances for Leinster in the season after their underage campaign and made the Six Nations squad for the full senior side.
Keith Earls made his debut at 19 and became a core player for Munster within two seasons before being regularly capped inside three seasons.
There are many other examples. Nash had the early debut and had everything going for him – electric pace, a great finisher, robust in contact – but he could never crack 10 games in a season.
There were the knocks I spoke about but the far bigger issue was there was also a roadblock of Irish-qualified test-involved wingers ahead of him and all of them were going through an unbelievable period of fitness from his first senior contract on.
When Calvin Nash entered the Munster Academy in 2016/17, Andrew Conway made an average of 21 appearances a season for Munster alone over the next three years prior to the World Cup while also becoming an Ireland regular. Keith Earls made an average of 13 Munster appearances a season in the same period while being an Ireland test regular. For a young player like Nash, the natural cycle point here would be to wait for the World Cup and then pick up the minutes that would naturally crop up in the absence of Conway and Earls. That’s exactly what Nash did, too, as he was regularly involved in the early season bloc, started an Interpro against Connacht and made the squad for a Leinster game before making his Champions Cup debut in January.
But… then the pandemic hit and all his momentum was halted. When Simon Zebo was re-signed from Racing 92, his momentum was stopped dead.
The pandemic and immediate post-pandemic saw him back in the usual Van Graan holding pattern for younger players where you’d get your booked in minutes during the season but, unless there was an injury, you weren’t going anywhere fast and Calvin Nash likes going places fast. There was a growing feeling that Nash had missed his window and, as he aged into 24/25, that his window had passed.
But then.
The appointment of Graham Rowntree as the new head coach – and the subsequent hiring of Mike Prendergast as the attack coach – changed everything for Nash, as did two seasons of near-complete unavailability for Andrew Conway, a season of injury for Keith Earls and selection churn for Simon Zebo.
Now Nash would have his chance – and an extended one.
Could he take that chance?
Could he ever.
It seemed like every single brass ring that Nash had to chase in the previous few years – what’s you’re kicking like, what’s your chasing like, what’s your high ball work like – combined with a system that perfectly synced into Nash’s natural strengths turned him from a fringe player into an incredibly complete Cat A starter.
He was running deep loop lines, he was making tight passes;
He was making deep linebreaks on transition, he was beating defenders in heavy traffic, he was engaging in long kicking battles with the threat of his break holding the length of the opposition, he was given incredibly low percentage try-scoring opportunities and he converted them like a guy who’d been doing it for the last few years.
In 2022/23, Calvin Nash delivered on the potential of the guy that lit up the Munster Senior Cup in 2014. To top it off, he got called up to the initial World Cup training squad which, for a non-Leinster player in the backline, in particular, is singularly impressive this cycle. It’s also somewhat cyclical in that Nash essentially took the spot of Jordan Larmour, the player who seemed to leave Nash in the dust back in 2017/18.
Five seasons later, Calvin Nash looks like he’s ready to take what’s his. He’s done it in Europe, he’s done it in big knockout games, now all he needs to do is push onto test level and, if he shows the same composure, captain-mentality and killer instinct he showed in red, he’ll see France in green this autumn.
