French may be the language of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Voltaire, but sometimes it takes a rugby player from Cork to inject extra oomph.
Ronan O’Gara, a former Ireland international who coaches the French club La Rochelle, has lit up the internet with a pep talk to his team that seamlessly blended French with English swearing, graced with a Cork accent.
“L’opportunité est fucking énorme,” he told his players on the eve of a match against Bordeaux.
They needed to focus on their own performance, he said, jabbing a finger. “Je m’en fucking fous d’adversaire”, O’Gara exhorted, which can be translated as “I don’t give a fucking damn about the opposition”.
Were they hungry to win the game, he asked, his voice rising, or were they planning on taking a “fucking … vacance”?
It was not a speech to win a medal from the Académie Française language watchdog, or to land an invitation to present next year’s Eurovision, but the clip has amassed millions of views and widespread praise.
Definitely worth a watch, Ronan O’Gara giving the most Irish team talk while actually speaking French. #rugby pic.twitter.com/TcVJ5i73FJ
— Joe Naughton (@JoeNaConnacht) August 7, 2023
“Something about this is absolutely glorious,” one commentator tweeted. “As a Frenchwoman, I give him 100% reason to speak in French,” said another, who rejected the need for perfection. “Motivation in any language,” said another.
The speech succeeded: on 10 June La Rochelle beat Bordeaux 24 to 13.
O’Gara is rugby royalty. The fly-half won nine trophies with Munster and 128 caps for Ireland while scoring 1,083 Test match points. After retiring as a player in 2013, he relocated with his wife and five children to start a coaching career with the Paris-based Racing 92 before moving to La Rochelle in south-western France in 2019.
The initial period of trying to function in French was “horrendous”, he told the Mirror in 2022.
“You’d need a bit of backbone about you – it’s difficult at the start. You’ve got to push yourself beyond the zone of making a fool of yourself for three months. I’d be in a situation where I didn’t have the words and needed a solution, so it would be like, ‘Help me here, boys.’ But once you ask for help, people help.”
O’Gara did not need to write emails in French but needed vocabulary to communicate verbally, he said. “You can talk 70% in French, 20% in English and make it up for the other 10%. The boys can have a good laugh at me trying to express myself in Cork French.”
The Irishman has led La Rochelle to back-to-back Champions Cup triumphs.
