Leinster outhalf believes there are plenty more thrills to come in roller-coaster career

Joey Carbery turns 31 this Sunday. This week 10 years ago he celebrated his 21st with the Irish squad in Chicago and went on to make his debut off the bench, playing the last quarter and converting Robbie Henshaw’s try in Ireland’s historic first win over the All Blacks in 111 years of trying.

“You actually can’t write it better,” he says, smiling broadly as if almost still in wonderment himself. “If someone asked me as a five-year-old: ‘What’s your first international cap?’ That would have been it. I still look back on it as a bit of a pinch-me moment.”

Fast-forward a decade.

“Time just goes like that,” he says, clicking his fingers, while reflecting on that momentous day from an office at Leinster HQ last Wednesday.

“It’s almost like a blink of an eye. You look at some of the guys even in here, they’re born in like 2006/2007. It’s crazy. I used to be that guy.”

That guy is now Caspar Gabriel, Leinster’s academy outhalf, for whom Carbery is “a personal taxi” these days.

“It’s the exact same gap between Johnny [Sexton] and myself as him and myself. He turned 21 two weeks ago. It’s crazy how it flips.”

Carbery is also renewing some old acquaintances. Last weekend’s second full debut for Leinster against Munster was his first game alongside Jamison Gibson-Park since the last of 37 caps again Fiji in November 2022.

“He’s got better. It’s crazy. Last time I played with him, he had hair as well,” says Carbery with a wry smile.

“He was always very, very good, but now so much is created by him, and for a 10 that’s great, because when you’re at the bottom of a ruck or you’re elsewhere, you know that he’s well capable.”

Plenty else hasn’t changed. The building is the same, while Leo Cullen and other former team-mates remain from when he left Leinster to join Munster in 2018.

“I feel like this place just oozes excellence. There’s a standard set and that you need to live by that feeling of ‘right, we’re here to work’, and then when you step outside the building, you can chill. Looking around the dressingroom, you see world-class players and guys I played with eight years ago. That’s made my step back in here easier.”

Carbery is also being coached by Jacques Nienaber and a former Munster outhalf rival/team-mate in Tyler Bleyendaal. “He showed me a few clips of when he came on at 10 and I went to 15 and we interlinked, which is pretty cool. He’s a great coach as well. Very laid-back, but I like that about him.”

After six seasons at Munster and two with Bordeaux Bègles, Carbery had options, but the lure of coming home was irresistible.

“Yes, you look at it and maybe it doesn’t make as much sense. But for me, if you’re the starting 10 at Leinster, you’ve a good chance to be the starting 10 for Ireland. I never thought it would happen again and it’s great to have it.”

He notes that he was Leinster’s only starting player last week not going into Irish camp. He’s not the same player as he was at 21. He had no fear then but believes he has a better appreciation of game management while being every bit as ambitious.

The fire still burns, for with the passing years comes the realisation that there is less time ahead. He’s also married, to Robyn Flanagan, and has two kids, a baby boy Beau, who was only eight weeks old when they moved to Bordeaux, and a 15-month-old baby girl Noah. His parents and Robyn’s both live in Kildare, so now they can share their kids with family.

Carbery’s dad Joe was born in Ireland but moved to New Zealand he was five months old. He met Carbery’s mum, Amanda, when she was 20 while in Ireland before they started a new life in New Zealand, where Carbery was born, before relocating back to Ireland when he was 11. Carbery has a little brother Culann (23) and a sister Ciara (27).

They grew up in Dargaville, where Carbery began playing rugby from the age of four, barefoot. His first pair of boots were at the age of 11. He played for his primary school St Joseph’s on Saturday mornings and then spent the day with the same friends.

Ronan O’Gara once compared Carbery to Beauden Barrett and those formative years in bare feet shaped him as a player.

“That’s when you learn the game, and it was very instinctive. All you were doing was beating the guy in front of you. There’s no shape, it’s just me versus you and you’re in bare feet. Even in school, every lunchtime was just rugby. So, it definitely has a part. I’m not sure how much, but when I came over here, I was maybe seeing the game a little bit differently. I definitely noticed that.”

His talent shone at Ardscoil na Tríonóide and Athy RFC and he played through the Leinster underage ranks from 15s, winning a Schools Cup with Blackrock and an AIL in 2016 with Clontarf, who he has rejoined.

In his first spell with Leinster. Stuart Lancaster employed him as a second playmaker from fullback along with Sexton, and he was a replacement in Leinster’s Pro 14 and Champions Cup final wins.

Cullen has always maintained Carbery’s ensuing move to Munster was a mistake and the result of outside pressure.

Carbery sighs. It’s probably not a question he really wants to answer.

“I was put under a bit of pressure. It was coming into a World Cup cycle, and they wanted me playing 10. Stuart saw me as a 15. I was happy in either, but I wanted to play for Ireland, and Joe [Schmidt] said he couldn’t pick me unless I was playing 10. So, it just came about that way.”

He still sees himself as a 10 who can play 15 and notes the two positions are inextricably linked, both in covering the backfield and operating as playmakers.

Among the highs with Ireland were that first cap in Chicago and playing a significant role in the 2018 Grand Slam coronation in Twickenham. And despite being jettisoned after the win over Fiji in November 2022, his 37 caps make Carbery Ireland’s most experienced current outhalf.

Yet whereas Jack Crowley and Sam Prendergast have been given extended runs in the 10 jersey, one of the consequences of competing with Sexton and being versatile is that Carbery has never started more than two Tests in succession.

“It’s something that I’ve always thought about, and I would have always loved a run.”

His career has had more twists than most. Injuries have played their part and he wishes he’d played more for Ireland. You wonder if he has any regrets.

“Would I go back and change it? No. Would I wish things happened differently? Yes. But I don’t think I’d change it because every decision was made to play for Ireland at 10. These things happen.”

By wishing things had happened differently?

“That I went and progressed on, and either took it away from Johnny, or when he stepped away, I became the starting 10. That is still with me to this day, that call I had with Andy [Farrell] in 2023, when he said I wasn’t involved.

“It hurt me a lot. The move [to Munster] was to play for Ireland. It’s something that definitely fuels me. I’ve used it in different ways to help me get through tough times. If I hadn’t been dropped, I wouldn’t have gone to Bordeaux. So it opened up doors, to me wanting to get back from injuries when maybe I would have just said: ‘No, I’m done.’ So, it’s fuelled me and hopefully made me a better player.”

He’ll always have great memories from his time in Munster, “and, more importantly, friends for life”. Alas, his time there ended on a sour note when dropped by Graham Rowntree on Munster’s South African trek for the 2022-23 URC title run-in without so much as an explanation, before being confined to a peripheral role the following season. That was an unhappy time in his career.

“When the Bordeaux opportunity or any other opportunity came up, I definitely didn’t want to stay.”

His second season in Bordeaux was cut short by that ACL injury in training last February, but he still played 34 games, 18 of them from the start. The food and wine weren’t too shabby either.

“The Top 14 is a different animal; the amount of games they play, the size of the teams you come up against every week, the support. How important every point is in the Top 14 is crazy. There were stages when there was maybe three or four points between 12th and 2nd. It’s mental. It’s crazy, but I learned a lot about the way the French really live up to their kind of stereotypical flair.

“I remember being given out to by Damian Penaud because I didn’t give the ball to him. I was like: ‘There’s two people in front of you.’ He was like: ‘I don’t care.’ Over here you’re kind of looking for the perfect picture, whereas over there ‘we don’t need the perfect picture, we’re happy to go’. So that really opened up my mind to that.”

Noel McNamara, a dark horse to succeed Cullen, initially reached out to Carbery. “He is such a good human being. Him and his wife, Sinéad, were so good to Robyn and myself. And as a coach he gets it. He can connect with you personally, and then on a rugby way.”

As Carbery showed with a couple of line breaks a week ago, players can now make complete recoveries from ACL operations. “The strapping is a mental thing which it’s felt helps with ACLs. Six or seven weeks ago I hit my highest speed on the GPS in eight/nine years.

“So that’s good for confidence and to get the ball in my hands and make line breaks is nice, because I want to be a threat, to be scoring tries and to be bringing that side of my game through.”

It’s been a rich career, full of ups and downs, and possibly hasn’t all panned out quite as hoped or anticipated a decade ago this week. But it could yet.

“I have full confidence it can be. And I’m doing everything I can to make it that way.”