Michael Murphy appears to have impressed during his week with French Top 14 rugby side Clermont Auvergne.
The Donegal captain spent last week at Stade Marcel-Michelin as part of AIB’s Toughest Trade series, which also saw Welsh legend Shane Williams spent a week with Murphy’s club, Glenswilly.
Murphy traveled to Clermont last week for a week with the results to be shown by RTE.
According to ex-England internationals Nick Abendanon and David Strettle, Murphy was quite at home at the oval ball game.
“He didn’t look out of place at all in any of the training sessions we did,” Abendanon told The Irish Times’ Mark Rodden.
“He’s obviously very well athletically built. He was there or thereabouts in terms of lifting the same weights as us in the gym.
“I was pretty impressed with his speed. He seemed pretty quick in his agility off the mark . . . you wouldn’t be able to tell that he was actually an amateur.”
Strettle was quick to point out how Murphy’s ‘kicking and catching’ had impressed.
He said:
“Especially being a back-three player, you do appreciate somebody who’s obviously got a good catch on them.
“We were doing some high balls in one of the training sessions and you can see the skill set that the boys have so it’s definitely impressive.”
Murphy’s tales of the GAA’s parish rule and the weekly schedule of a typical inter-county player certainly impressed the pair.
Strettle said: “I didn’t realise that the town that you’re born in, that’s the team you play for, which I think is amazing. I could just imagine the unity that builds in a team.
“It’s really nice to win things with your mates but I can imagine if you win things with the people that you went to school with or people growing up in exactly the same village and towns as you, it must be unbelievable.
“One thing which is really important to us is our downtime because we get trained really hard and we do need some time off our feet.
“But those guys don’t get it. When they’re needing downtime, that’s when they’re actually going to do their proper jobs, doing their nine-to-five work. It’s really impressive.”
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