Hugo Keenan goes from clutching toilet bowl to clinching Lions series

From clutching the toilet bowl in Perth and Brisbane, to clinching the British & Irish Lions their first series win in 12 years in Melbourne, it has been quite a tour for Hugo Keenan.

Let us start at the end. There are 79 minutes and five seconds on the clock when Jamison Gibson-Park feeds the ball left to Keenan, who is faced with a two-on-two of him and Jack Conan against Len Ikitau and Max Jorgensen. Ikitau is on his heels, and Keenan realises it quickly, so uses the skills he has learnt playing sevens to flick his feet out to the left, to challenge Ikitau’s outside shoulder. If he can get past him, his momentum will surely take him over the tryline.

For a moment Jorgensen bites in, meaning there is a pass available to Conan, so the No8 can score, but Keenan, five metres out, has the power to leave Ikitau clutching at air, and with the ball tucked under his left arm he reaches out to score the decisive try. Two-nil. Series secured (after a television match official check for that Jac Morgan clear-out on Carlo Tizzano).

“It was off the back of two minutes of phase attack, the lads digging deep,” Keenan, 29, said breathlessly afterwards. “Where there is a will there is a way.”

Now spool back a few weeks, to Keenan’s first fortnight on tour, and that last phrase seems more pertinent. In Perth he picked up a virus that “hit him on a different level”. The Irish full back could not shift it for 12 days. Already one of the slightest players on tour — weighing 88kg (13st 12lb), he lost 6kg (13lb) in that time, as he could not keep anything down.

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“Getting off the jacks [toilet] was an issue,” Keenan said. “It was a rough few weeks. I’ve never had something like that. God, it was pretty horrible. Every day you think you’re going to be waking up the next day better. You think it’s going to be a 24-hour, 48-hour thing, but it was just frustrating the length of time that it kept on going.”

He was given high-calorie shakes, and endless bottles of fluids by the nutritionists to try to rescue him as the team moved to Brisbane to face the Queensland Reds. Keenan needed a game, and was picked at full back, but had to withdraw late as he threw up his breakfast again. Elliot Daly started, and broke his arm during the game. The next day he flew home. The sliding doors of a Lions tour.

Keenan said he felt “terrible” in the game against the Waratahs DAVID ROGERS/GETTY IMAGES

Keenan was in for the Waratahs, but barely had the energy to play. No wonder he did not state a great case in Sydney. “I felt terrible in that Waratahs game. But look, sometimes you just have to front up and do what’s needed,” he said.

So, then, with two matches before the first Test, Keenan’s chances looked slim of starring in the series. Yet he played his way in via the Australia & New Zealand Invitational XV match in Adelaide, with a classy performance, where he covered the back-field expertly.

Cut back to the second Test, and it was Keenan who stopped a 50:22 kick attempt from the Wallabies fly half Tom Lynagh with a flick in-field at the last possible moment before his legs were in touch, just after half-time. A key moment to halt Australian momentum.

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Then, at the end, he was fit enough, and had the legs, to round Ikitau. Those high-calorie shakes did the job, in the end.

The Lions, particularly all of the Irish players, were inspired by a video message from the boxer Katie Taylor, telling them to be “prepared to win with skill, but be ready to win by will”. That was Keenan at the end.

Conan, outside him, of course wanted him to pass. “He had a bit of a rocky start to the campaign with the sickness that derailed him for a while and it’s a testament to his professionalism and staying in it,” the No8 said, clutching two cans of Guinness by the changing rooms afterwards.

“I was delighted for him. Now in saying that, I would have liked it more if he gave me the ball on the edge and I scored the try. No, delighted for Barry [Keenan’s nickname], I probably would have dropped it like the other one . . .

“Barry goes and scores a try — I’ve no complaints, if he bottled it there in that moment I would have killed him and kicked the arse off him afterwards, but that was great.”

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After the victory had been confirmed, Keenan was hoisted aloft by Mack Hansen and Jamie George, the former later saying they should build the full back a statue. Keenan jumped into the Melbourne Cricket Ground crowd several times, wearing a Tongan chocolate-bar garland — a lei — given to him by Sione Tuipulotu’s family — to see his parents, brother, uncle, aunt and girlfriend plus ten mates who he said had “spent a bomb” to be there to watch him.

Keenan enjoys his crowning moment with Hansen and George SPORTSFILE

“It’s a bit surreal. It was a class moment,” Keenan said, pinching himself having completed the Lions, and his own, special comeback. He had had a calf injury from late May, before the trip out here too.

“It’s been a mad whole trip. It’s not how I imagined it going, getting sick for two weeks and coming in to camp a bit injured. It’s been a rollercoaster, but I suppose these things happen for a reason, and thankfully I was in full health come the last two Tests. It’s special having our family and friends out on the pitch with us at the end. It’s those moments you play rugby for and you dream of.”

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