Gavan Casey

THE FIRST TIME I heard fans chant Simon Zebo’s name was at Musgrave Park on 19 March 2007. I was 14. I didn’t join in.

Having collected a wonky kick just inside his own half, the Pres wing instantly skinned two Christians chasers and turned the corner towards the North Terrace. As he raced down the right edge, he feigned to chip, fixing the final CBC defender for a millisecond before hammering the accelerator again and sending the black-and-white half of Muzzer into orbit.

I was in a black hole, wearing red. Pres pulled level with my school on Senior Cup titles. Simon Zebo’s score was the talk of Cork.

Many years later, Zebo joined Murray Kinsella and myself onstage for an ‘Evening With’ live event at Dublin’s Liberty Hall Theatre. We dug out the only surviving broadcast footage of the try — a glitchy, low-def rip from Setanta Sports’ live coverage — to play on the big screen.

‘Thank God somebody recorded it and uploaded it at the time,’ we thought. Only then did we clock the uploader’s profile name: SimonZebo.

There was our opening gag, anyway.

Zebo made no apologies that night and, rest assured, he leant into it 17 years ago as well.

In Pres, Zebo was naturally considered a legend. In my school, he was naturally considered a cocky prick, biy (Here’s something that I would not be able to remember almost two decades later unless it truly annoyed me at the time: written on his Bebo profile were the words, ‘Here comes the Hotstepper’ — a reference both to Ini Kamoze’s 1994 reggae fusion banger and to himself).

Broadly speaking, those were the two lenses through which Zebo continued to be perceived for a fair chunk of his professional career. But Munster fans were almost universally in the legend camp. And now Zebo is one in the literal sense, his 72 tries across two spells leaving him 30 clear of the nearest active player, Gavin Coombes, in the province’s all-time stakes.

With Zebo’s impending retirement at the age of 34, Munster are losing a legitimate asset. He may not have a 60-yard heartbreaker in his legs in 2024 but his performances on the South African tour in particular illustrated the improvements that he has made to other parts of his game even at this stage of his career, most notably in defence.

Indeed, there was a stage back in January, with Hugo Keenan an injury concern entering the Six Nations, when a Zebo call-up for Ireland wouldn’t have been completely off the wall.

Ultimately, that ship sailed up the Seine in 2018 as Zebo took some of his prime rugby years to Racing. A test against Japan the previous summer would prove to be his final cap.

By that stage, he and Joe Schmidt had probably endured enough of each other in any case. There was never any massive fallout — these were two men with irreconcilably different artistic visions for the game of rugby union.

The problem for Zebo — and he openly acknowledged it — was that the other guy was his boss.

“We’re complete opposites, like Yin and Yang,” Zebo told us at Liberty Hall Theatre in 2018. “I worked with him for a few years and got to know him a little better… Still opposites!”

Playing in two Six Nations title-winning campaigns, a World Cup, and starring in a first ever victory over the All Blacks is a solid return from a test career which still feels as though it was only partly fulfilled.

And yet the snapshot in green which will forever precede Zebo is The Flick against Wales in Cardiff in 2013, which as it so happens occurred under Declan Kidney’s watch.

Rarely has an in-game incident elevated a player’s profile in the world game to such an extent. And rarely has a piece of skill so perfectly emblematised the player who pulled it out of their hat, because like most of Simon Zebo’s moments of improvisational magic since the 2007 Munster Senior Schools Cup final, it wasn’t gimmicky; it was as effective as it was mesmerising.

Consider for a moment the players on whom Ireland depend to go off-script: Jamison Gibson-Park, James Lowe and Mack Hansen. In Munster’s case, it’s most often Antoine Frisch who concocts an opportunity from thin air. They are the four most instinctive players in the country. And none of them learned how to play rugby here.

That Zebo’s similar rugby intuition has for so long made him an outlier among talents cultivated in Ireland would suggest that there’s a kink in the hose somewhere. But it equally says something about Zebo’s force of personality that he’s as bold with ball in hand now as he was in school.

He still sees things on the field that no other player can see. He still even does things that nobody in the ground can see the first time around: it took a slow-motion replay of his phantom offload to Damian de Allende in Munster’s 2022 Champions Cup last-16 victory over Exeter before he was serenaded with another chorus of ‘Zebo! Zebo! Zebo!’

It will still be said of Zebo in the coming days that he could have squeezed more out of his career if he took rugby more seriously but the Munster man has always existed outside of that insularity in which fans and players alike can become trapped.

He was never a systems man and he can make a strong case that he beat this one.

Playing professional rugby wasn’t the semi-miserable existence for Zebo that it quietly becomes for so many of his contemporaries.

He refused to compromise on life outside of work hours and he still lit up stadiums for nearly 15 years. He travelled the world with life-long friends and gave his young family a massive financial headstart by expressing himself in a game he loves. He won trophies with both his province and country, toured with the Lions, and fulfilled a childhood dream of playing in France.

And for the rest of his life, he won’t be able to make it as far as the stand in Thomond Park or Musgrave Park without first hearing his name ring out.

There goes The Hotstepper. No wonder he was always smiling.