Day 1 - Mon 13th Oct 08

The day has finally arrived. Today we begin the biggest journey of our rugby league lives when we board the first segment of our long haul flight to Australia to represent Ireland at Rugby League World Cup 2008 RLWC08. Two years of qualifying matches, multiple training sessions, games in Russia, Carlow and Dewsbury have finally culminated in this as we all meet in Manchester for this epic journey. A whole summer of final preparations to get this professional squad ready for the challenge of a lifetime and now we truly are ready for the battle of our lives. This will no doubt be the biggest and most intense battling any of us have ever done and it will be performed on the best stage rugby league has to offer, a world cup with intense media coverage and packed stadia for 4 weeks. We have to get there first and that means three flights, 8 hours, 7 hours and 9 hours duration with an hour stopover in Dubai and Bangkok airports to transfer planes. Whoever said they loved flying I bet they never flew like this. For some of our lads it has been a late but well deserved call up, Brendan and Shayne only found out that they were picked less than a week before today but such is the dedication of them and the management that they have arrived with kit, bags, tracksuits and the mental resolve to do a job. Those of the lads based in Ireland had a very early start with interviews at 9am in Dublin airport with RTE prior to flying to Manchester, Ross, Wayne, Stevie Gibbons and the doc had a long day that one as they had to wait in Manchester till 5pm for the rest of us. The other two Irish lads Ed Daly, assistant conditioner and Brendan had flown from Shannon and missed the meeting with RTE, with the amount of talking they do I am sure the media will catch up to them sometime. At the appointed time we all met at the Emirates desk and there was a significant media presence there as well to do final interviews before we left. The England team were on the same plane as us but weren't flying all the way to Sydney as we were so we said goodbye to them in Dubai. We flew out at 9pm and our conditioner Colin Robertson wanted us to stay awake for the first flight to get acclimatised quicker when we finally arrive in Sydney, that was a hard job staying awake and some of us struggled. When we changed planes he gave us the option of sleeping late on the second flight or sleeping for the whole last flight, it was a toss up. The idea was to have us fresh when we landed as we were leaving Monday night and arriving Wednesday morning at 10 am and the first training was at 12 midday. Not much time but that was what he felt was best to get in the zone for peak conditioning.