Beno Obano: ‘Blending into the background is not my style. It’s hard to when every time you watch TNT Sport your face pops up from the final’
Beno Obano could have hid after his red card in the Premiership final but instead he bought the brightest pair of boots.
When Beno Obano was sent off in the biggest club rugby match of his life he could have run away and hid. Instead he bought the brightest pair of boots on the market.
Bath had lost the chance to become English champions for the first time this century, hamstrung by the England prop’s 22nd-minute red card. To add insult to injury the ban that came with it cost him his Test jersey.
Obano will argue until the cows come home that his high tackle did not merit a dismissal. So you can imagine what he made of his four-game suspension.
Orange is the new black
Nonetheless, he was never going to back himself into a hedge, Homer Simpson style. Here he is, four months on, playing out of his skin in a pair of orange boots you can see from the Moon.
“I’ll tell you a story about them,” says the 29-year-old, whose two tries at Gloucester last week set the tone for Bath’s biggest-ever win in that most fiercely contested of fixtures.
“I wore them first two games of the season. Then against Bristol I switched to the black ones I wore in the final. We lost and I hurt my toe. So it’s back to orange. I’m not touching those black boots ever again.”
In truth he doesn’t want to talk about the red card, but those boots are so bright, such a statement, so impossible to miss, that some sort of explanation is needed.
“I guess blending into the background is not my style,” he begins. “I feel I’m quite an honest and confident person. And it’s hard to go into the shadows when every time you watch TNT Sport your face pops up from the final!
“That (final) is in the past. There’s nothing I can do about that now. We’ve all grieved and been sad about it. Now it’s time to perform and create some new memories.
“Time is a healer. It wasn’t so much, get away and not think about it. You process it and think what you might have done differently. If there’s not that much you just have to accept it’s not an ideal situation and move forward.”
Being twice as good
Obano is into his stride now. “It’s all good and well saying ‘I don’t think that should have been a red’, cos I don’t,” he adds. “It’s all good and well getting on your high horse and beating your chest. But that is gone, bruv. What you going to do about it, Beno?
“All you can do is make sure you’re not in that situation again. Be even better. It’s something I’ve always thought from a young age. I think it’s being a young black boy, particularly.
“It always felt, or at least you’ve always been told from a young age, that you have to be twice as good to get half as far. So it’s just one of things. It’s happened. You just have to be better, Beno.
“No-one cares. There’s no excuses to be made. Whether you agree with it our not that’s what happened, so just be better from now on. Be as good as you can possibly be’. That’s what I’m trying to do.”
Obano is a breath of fresh air, a man whose zest for life is infectious. Even when Johann van Graan, Bath’s director of rugby, subbed him off at Kingsholm, denying him a possible hat-trick, he could not get angry.
“Johann promised to leave me on the next time I score two,” said the Londoner. “I was like, ‘I’m really not sure when that will be!’ It doesn’t happen every week.”
You can tell Van Graan likes Obano, who is a cousin to Maro Itoje, by the way he smiles as the loose-head, sitting beside him in a midweek media session, talks to the room.
“Beno is one of our most important players and a class human being,” says the South African, who has turned water to wine during his time at the Rec.
“The way he has responded [to the red card] has been ultra-professional. He hasn’t said a word, he’s made no excuses. Instead he’s done something himself in terms of dropping his [tackle] height in contact.”
“Hunger across the board”
It was not enough to earn him an England recall this week, having sat out the summer tour to Japan and New Zealand where Fin Baxter, who he just so happens to play against this weekend, emerged strongly.
But he is undoubtedly repaying any debt he might feel he owed Bath from Twickenham; their 100 per cent record in the set-piece at Gloucester confirming them as serious title contenders.
“There’s a hunger across the board to really achieve things this season,” says Obano. “Everything we learned from last year we’ve put into this year.
“We’ve grown closer as a group because of all the memories we’ve made. And there’s not been much change in the squad. All those things together are helping us really go after this season.”