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After that, I had a ten-day break before returning to school and resuming my commitments with my club and the Academy.
I was also hungry, which didn’t bode well for my temper.
I didn’t do well with long intervals between meals.
My lifestyle and intense training regime required me to eat at regular allotted time frames. Every two hours was ideal for my body when I was consuming a 4,500-calorie-a-day diet. Leave my stomach waiting longer than four hours, and I was a moody, pissy bitch. It wasn’t like I was particularly looking forward to the mountain of fish and steamed vegetables waiting for me in my lunch box, but I was in a routine, dammit. Fucking with my regimen was a surefire way of waking the hangry beast inside of me.
We’d been on the pitch less than half an hour, and already I’d taken out three of my teammates and had taken a bollocking from our coach in the process.
In my defense, every tackle I made on them was a perfectly legal one, if not a little ruthless.
But that was my point, dammit.
I was too aggravated to take it back a notch on boys who weren’t anywhere near my level of playing.
Boys was the appropriate word in this instance.
These were boys.
I played with men.
I often wondered what the point was in playing on the school team.
It didn’t do shite for me.
Club level was basic enough but schoolboy rugby was a fucking waste of my time.
Especially this school.
Today was the first day back after Christmas break, but the school team had been training since September.
Four months.
Four fucking months and we looked more disorganized than ever.
For the millionth time in the past six years, I found myself resenting my parents’ move. Had we stayed in Dublin, I would be playing on a quality team with quality players and making some actual goddamn progression.
But no, instead I was here, in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, picking up the slack for a less-than-adept trainer and busting my bollocks to keep our side in sights of the qualifiers.
We won the league cup last year because we had a solid team with the ability to actually play decent fucking rugby.
With the absence of several players from last year’s squad, who were now gone on to college, my agitation and concern for our chances this year were growing by the minute.
I wasn’t the only one who felt like this, either.
There were six or seven exceptional players left in this school who were good enough for the division we were playing in, and that was the problem.
We needed a bench of twenty-three decent players to excel in this league.
Not half a dozen.
My best friend for example, Gerard Gibson—or Gibsie for short—was a prime example of exceptional.
He was, without a shadow of doubt, the best flanker I’d played with or against in this level of rugby and could easily move up the ranks with a little commitment and effort.
Unlike me, though, rugby wasn’t Gibsie’s life.
Giving up parties and girlfriends for a few years was a small price to pay for a professional career in the sport. If he laid off the drink and cigarettes, he’d be phenomenal.
