‘Everything just goes up a level’: James McNabney learning at speed with Ireland

Almost all the Ireland team who reached the Under-20 World Cup final in 2023 have broken into provincial rugby, but, with Paddy McCarthy and Gus McCarthy absent, Sam Prendergast is the only full international from that cohort in the squad for the Nations Championship fixtures.

But Prendergast does at least have one team-mate from that final, and the back-to-back under-20 Grand Slams that preceded it, alongside him in Andy Farrell’s 36-man squad: the uncapped Ulster backrower James McNabney.

The 23-year-old’s elevation would probably have happened sooner but for an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury that sidelined him after being named as a training panellist for last year’s summer Tests in Georgia and Portugal, as he had been for that’s year’s Six Nations.

But, having become a first-choice for Ulster, the injury put paid to last season.

“I was just in training and I sidestepped, planted hard with a leg, and I just heard the pop and that was it,” McNabney says.

“There’s not much that’s good about it,” he also says of the injury, but overcoming setbacks builds resilience.

“You think you’re going somewhere and you go two steps forward, and then sometimes you hit a speed bump, and then you end up two back. But I got through it and I’m back.”

Injuries to Caelan Doris and Jack Conan opened the door, but McNabney’s inclusion – despite only starting one of his four games for Ulster so far this season – is with good reason. Irish rugby tends not to produce athletes of his type: a 6ft 5in, 19-stone loose forward.

That considered, his nickname – “Horse” – seems fair.

“When Dan McFarland was Ulster’s head coach, he gave me an opportunity against Glasgow. There was a ball over the top of the lineout, and I caught it and was running up the pitch and, typically the way I run, I run with high knees,” McNabney says.

“And he said that I looked like a big old horse when I was running up the pitch, and it’s stuck ever since then. And that’s how I’ve been called Horse.”

[ ‘Some specimen of a man’: Why Andy Farrell has faith in uncapped James McNabney ]

The nickname is also apt for other reasons. While at Cambridge House Grammar School, in Ballymena, Co Antrim, he excelled at mounted games, which he describes “like agility on a pony”.

“I was not as big as I am now. In mounted games, they can go up to 14.3, 14.2-hand ponies, on the edge of becoming a horse,” he says.

“I did that for Northern Ireland and represented Great Britain in that too. I went to Royal Windsor Horseshow when I was maybe 14/15, and that was Northern Ireland, and then I went to America for an international mounted games exchange when I was 15/16.

“When the under-18 interpros were on, I took two weeks out of training in the summer to go to America for that, and Jonny Graham [pathway coach] at Ulster was raging that I had disappeared to do that. But I still managed to play in the interpros.”

But soon the time came to choose a path. “I had to make the decision to put on weight and give up the horses. It was an easy enough decision. I was getting to the end of that [mounted games], I was looking for something different,” McNabney says.

As a child, if McNabney wasn’t in school or playing rugby, then he was usually horse riding or working on his family’s dairy and sheep farm, just north of Ballymena.

“Hopefully one day I’ll take it over. I’ll be the third generation,” he says, following his father, Howard, and grandfather, James.

“Farming is like my game of golf when I get a down day. I like to farm. When I was growing up, it was either horses or farming. There was exercise in all aspects of it.

“But the odd time in the summer we had to shear sheep, and if anyone’s ever sheared sheep, they know exactly what that entails. It’s not easy. But it’s not every day you’re doing work on a farm; some days you’re driving, some days you’re lifting things. There’s a variety of work, which is nice about it.”

McNabney didn’t touch a rugby ball until he was 11 at Cambridge House, where his uncle had been captain of the first team.

“I was probably slightly bigger, taller than some of the other kids, and I had aggression, determination, things that transferred from the horses. I didn’t really take to it like a duck to water, but I did enjoy it straight away.”

Despite having been a virtual ever-present in Ireland’s consecutive under-20s Grand Slams, McNabney’s promotion to the senior fold has come relatively soon after his ACL injury, and he admits “the speed of the training” has taken him back.

“All the quality players from all the provinces together, everything just goes up a level. It’s obviously international rugby. I haven’t played internationally [at senior level], but you can definitely see the speed of the training, the attention to detail. I was all aware of that before, but it’s just sometimes a wee bit of a shock to the system.”

While he’s honest about his hopes to play Test rugby for Ireland, he’s fully aware there are no guarantees, least of all in this international window.

“I’m going to have to work hard to hopefully get an opportunity, and if it comes, that would be absolutely great, it would be a dream come true. Every time at home, you’d watch Ireland playing and you just think, ‘Could you get to that stage?’. I’m only 23, so you don’t know if that’s achievable and different things,” McNabney says.

“Then, previous to the ACL, you get picked for camp. ‘This is maybe on my radar, I could play for Ireland’. Now I’ve actually been picked in the squad, so hopefully. Time will tell and we’ll see how we go, but I’m not saying anything too soon.”