RUGBY: JAMES TRACY INTERVIEW
Tracy enjoying burgeoning role with Leinster
By Daire Walsh
FOLLOWING his tenth appearance of the season against Newport Gwent Dragons in the Guinness Pro12 at Rodney Parade on Friday evening, James Tracy’s stock is continuing to rise.
Indeed, the past month has been a particularly memorable one for Tracy, who was handed his maiden European start at first-team level by Leo Cullen at home to Bath in the Champions Cup.
Speaking in relation to this game at Leinster HQ, the former Newbridge College student revealed that he was experiencing contrasting emotions in the build-up to this encounter, but was pleased with the way the action eventually developed for him.
“Obviously, to get a start in such a big game, naturally you’re going to be nervous, excited, all of those different feelings. I tried to prepare the same I do every week, but it is something special. I had to sit down and write out what I wanted to get out of the week just to keep calm and clear out my head,” Tracy remarked.
“Then when it got to it, there were a lot of young players picked and given a chance and, thankfully, it went well. Leo said to us ‘just do your own thing, make sure you look after your job and everything else will fall into place’. We weren’t kind of thinking about the result. We were more thinking about the performance and hopefully the result would follow that.”
Although he is now challenging international stars Sean Cronin and Richardt Strauss for the position of hooker with Leinster, Tracy actually began life with the province as a loosehead prop. However, prior to his departure as head coach in May 2013, Joe Schmidt suggested that he could benefit from a switch to hooker, and Tracy welcomed this piece of advice from the New Zealander with open arms.
“Joe before he left kind of suggested [it]. I was playing loosehead prop at the time and he was kind of asking me did I have aspirations to play internationally, and of course I said I did and he just felt that my frame wouldn’t be big enough to carry the weight I’d have to be to be an international prop, and that I should think about moving to hooker if that’s what I wanted to do. So I made the decision. That was it then.”
As they feature in the same row of the scrum, there are obvious similarities to draw between a prop and a hooker. Yet, there are also a number of differences in the roles, and quite often scrummaging is identified as a trait that a prop would be more comfortable with.
Tracy feels that looseheads garner the most enjoyment from a scrum, but even though he sees a hooker as being more akin to a tighthead, he acknowledges that scrummaging is a pivotal aspect of the game.
“As a loosehead, you kind of get a bit of a love for the scrum. It’s actually quite different, hooker. It’s more similar to a tighthead, the dark arts in there. I do enjoy it. It’s a massive part of the game, a lot of people overlook it, but the scrum is almost irrelevant unless you’re being dominated by another team and then it’s the most important thing because you can just win penalties and gain advantage and territory and it gives you momentum.”
“We talk about it the whole time, the first scrum in the game is going to set the tone for the rest of the game. It gives you energy if you’re dominant in that, it kind of spurs the whole team on,” Tracy added.