[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]I[/su_dropcap] don’t know Jack O’Donoghue outside of the guy I see between the four white lines. Everyone I know who knows him says the same thing – he’s the gentleman’s gentleman. I like to see good people do well so O’Donoghue is a guy I’ve been keeping a closer eye on than most over the last number of years. When he first broke into the Munster side in 2014/15, you could tell he had something about him – rangy, athletic, good core skills – and every subsequent season seemed to add to that feeling of potential, bar one injury curtailed season in 2018/19 after a serious knee injury suffered at the end of the 2016/17 season.
Yet that one “breakthrough” performance that every player needs to kick them up to the next level seemed to elude him.
He was plainly a good player but in a back row that often featured Peter O’Mahony, Tommy O’Donnell and CJ Stander, O’Donoghue found his opportunities for positional specification relatively limited. The early going of Jack O’Donoghue’s career often flowed around the circumstances of the time – the needs of the coach (he’s played under three as a professional) and the team’s needs when it comes to injury cover.
It seems to be lodged in the general consciousness that Jack O’Donoghue is “an Eight” and that any time he’s selected elsewhere means he’s playing out of position. I was certainly in that camp back in 2015 but my understanding of roles has changed my opinion on positional orthodoxy in the years since. Even then, if we forget about roles for a minute, is it even fair to say that O’Donoghue is an Eight these days anyway?
When we look at the jersey he’s started in since his debut season as a professional, we can see that he’s played all across the back row multiple times as and when required.
| Year | #6 | #7 | #8 | #20 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014/15 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 7 |
| 2015/16 | 4 | 11 | 3 | 8 |
| 2016/17 | 1 | 3 | 14 | 9 |
| 2017/18 | 8 | 5 | 5 | 12 |
| 2018/19 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 3 |
| 2019/20 | 7 | 6 | 0 | 4 |
| 2020/21 | 11 | 3 | 0 | 5 |
You can infer the needs of the team in certain seasons just by looking at where O’Donoghue played. In 2015/16, for example, when Tommy O’Donnell suffered a serious hip injury, O’Donoghue played a lot of his rugby at #7. When CJ Stander broke into the Irish squad in 2016, Jack O’Donoghue was back starting at #8 during his absences.
Since his debut, O’Donoghue has started for Munster 81 times and when we breakdown what jersey he started the contest in we see the following trends;
Blindside Flank: 28 starts
Openside Flank: 30 starts
Eight: 23 starts
If we look at the last two seasons we can see a definite drift towards blindside but this is just an expression of his role versatility within the Munster system. Jack O’Donoghue isn’t a blindside, he isn’t an openside, he isn’t an eight-man – he’s a Combo Flanker.
What is a Combo Flanker? It’s a back-row player who fills two or more support roles in the blend of a forward pack. This support role can be loading up on a combination of offensive ruck entries, defensive ruck entries, lineout work, impact defence while usually (but not always) running with a secondary or tertiary position in the ball carrying rotation. They are usually found in the wider channels on transition but, depending on their ruck workload, they may end up as regular screen players off #9.
Jack O’Donoghue can run in two different styles.
There’s the Lineout Dominant Combo Flanker, where he combines heavy lineout involvements as a primary target and counter-jumper with a wider ball-carrying profile and defensive radius. You’ll often see him running this role in the #6 jersey.
Then there’s the Off-Ball Combo Flanker role where his involvements as a ball carrier and direct lineout target are quite limited but he maxes his offensive ruck output and defensive work rate.
His performance against Leinster at the weekend was a really good example of the latter. Typically, you expect to see a heavy lineout load on both sides of the ball in Jack O’Donoghue’s game – he’s an excellent counter-jumper and lineout target, and a noted primary defensive mauler – but on Saturday, he was primarily used as a lifter and an offensive/defensive component of the midfield. A lot of his output was tilted towards impact defence and offensive ruck support during his 50-ish minutes on the field.
You can see the venom, pace and accuracy of these cleanouts illustrated fairly clearly here. O’Donoghue is an effective ball carrier – in the wider channels – but his usage in this game was tilted away from that. It’s not that he was forbidden from touching the ball, it’s just that his responsibilities had him as a guy who supports the carries of others and then maybe shows up on the third or fourth rotation of possession. In a game where we didn’t really have long sustained possession and looked all the better for it, it’s not a surprise to see him with less than two on-ball involvements.
He was constantly involved defensively, showing off his wide defensive radius, strong counter-rucking and stopping power in the tackle on a number of occasions.
In either Combo Flanker build, O’Donoghue has shown his value as a starter or finishing component off the bench. In some ways, I think his role as a starter against Leinster was a great blend with a power forward to finish in a way that the opposite might not have been. We used that combination in the PRO14 final and it didn’t really produce the outcome we wanted against physically stronger opposition in the context of that particular game.
In the same vein, it’s a bit like the Van Der Flier conundrum for Ireland and Leinster in big games; essentially, if O’Donoghue’s not starting, you need to have a very specific use for his role set off the bench in a tight game.
It’s in this aspect that you can see Jack O’Donoghue’s thought process on his frame and how it plays into his role set.
O’Donoghue is a pretty big dude. He’s 6’3″ and listed at around 110KG but he seems to be running a little lighter than that this season. If he was going to double down on his ball carrying, I think you’d see him adding weight to this frame but would that necessarily produce the best outcomes? This plays into the idea of specification as opposed to working on becoming “complete”. At 27 years of age, is it really worth throwing on an extra two or three KG of muscle onto your frame to be closer to a power forward build when it’ll likely come with an increased chance of injury, a likely decrease in top-end pace and acceleration, decreased output from a role perspective over 80 minutes and unpredictable outcomes in your lineout efficiency? Possibly. On the flip side, you could get more impact on the ball offensively and defensively, which is always valued quite highly.
By running lighter, relatively speaking, I think O’Donoghue has doubled down on what he’s already good at rather than trying to plug the one area of his game where he was not top-level – that would be his tight ball carrying. I’d rank him as one of the quickest back row players in the country at the moment and his frame plays into that.
By focusing on this role set, O’Donoghue can offer the kind of output to a coach that will fit multiple shapes and overall play styles. His stellar work this season is a testament to that versatility and production on both sides of the ball.
