A distraught Andrew Porter is consoled in the moments after highly fancied Ireland's quarter-final loss to the All Blacks at the 2023 Rugby World Cup. Photo / Getty Images
Rugby star Andrew Porter has revealed he needed therapy after Ireland’s 2023 Rugby World Cup quarter-final loss to the All Blacks.
The prop – a two-times British and Irish Lions tourist – cast himself as the villain in Ireland’s tense 28-24 defeat because of ill-discipline, a result that continued his nation’s failure to ever make it past the quarter-final stage of a World Cup.
More than two years on, in his no-holds-barred autobiography Heart on My Sleeve – My Story of Struggle and Strength, he has opened up about how much the loss in the tournament in France affected him mentally.
That includes taking him back mentally to the time of the death of his mother, Wendy Porter, from cancer when he was a schoolboy, in the process, reigniting and confronting that grief.
He was able to suppress those feelings initially, distracted by the joy of going on honeymoon with his wife.
But when the couple came home, negative thoughts enveloped Porter, with the prop writing: “It felt like a form of sleep paralysis, where you wake up at night constantly thinking there’s something lurking in the corner of the bedroom. A shadow that I couldn’t grasp.
“I became a hermit. I just didn’t want to talk to anyone, particularly my teammates, because I’d let them down.”
Porter says he was “devastated” when fulltime was blown in the quarter-final loss.
He knew he had made “mistakes”, including giving away repeated penalties.
“I suppose I lost the head a small bit,” he wrote.
“I felt that the mistakes I made in the game had cost us the result. I have never felt so low in my career.”
Mentally devastated, Porter went into therapy to try to address the negative thoughts and broken self-esteem.
“[The therapist] helped me to realise that I was making the defeat into something it wasn’t,” Porter wrote in Heart on My Sleeve.
“Instead of understanding that I’d simply made mistakes, I was thinking I was the worst player ever.”
The therapist also educated Porter that the grief he was feeling about the tournament exit of Ireland – who went into Rugby World Cup as favourites – was linked to past tragedy.
“She said that when you have lost someone close to you and you have another loss, your mind goes straight back to the first; it’s like muscle memory – you think that that’s how loss should feel,” he confided.
“Maybe that’s why my reaction to our World Cup defeat had been so dramatic. It was a double-edged sword in that nothing could compare to that first loss of Mum, but at the same time, I was experiencing every loss after it like the first.”
The newly released Heart on My Sleeve – published by Eriu – has since been short-listed as a finalist in the 2025 Irish Book of the Year awards.
Porter starts his brutally honest book with a poignant chapter on his mother’s death in 2008 and the huge impact the tragedy had on his family, and how they all handled the death differently.
“The first and really the fundamental loss in my life was that of my mum, Wendy.
“Every other loss that I’ve experienced on the field or in life, comes back to that. When she died, after a long struggle with cancer, I lost her, but I also lost my family, as we each grieved in our own way.
“People often say that grief can bring a family together, but in our case, we were all in our own worlds, trying to make sense of it in our own different ways.”
As well as the pain of his mother’s death – and how the World Cup loss to the All Blacks brought it back so painfully for him – Porter also opens up on how he battled a serious eating disorder while a schoolboy.
Porter is no stranger to New Zealand rugby fans.
He has toured here with both Ireland and the British and Irish Lions.
The powerful prop has also been involved in some of Ireland’s famous victories over the All Blacks over the past decade.
He also played a leading role in Netflix’s Six Nations: Full Contact that took viewers behind the scenes during two Six Nations campaigns, including talking about grief and other battles he has faced off the pitch.
That included his mother’s death, the eating disorder and thoughts of self-harm.
Porter was widely praised for being so honest in front of the TV cameras. Writing in Heart on My Sleeve, he said being so upfront was something he never regretted.
“To use the word ‘cathartic’ is a bit of a cliche, but it was: I felt that for the first time in my life I was saying: ‘This is who I am’.” Porter wrote.
“I decided that if I was going to tell my story in public like this, there was no way I could present a false version of myself or not tell the unvarnished truth.
“When the filming wrapped up, I felt a bit lighter, a bit freer, because I’d been fully myself.”
Neil Reid is a Napier-based senior reporter who covers general news, features and sport. He joined the Herald in 2014 and has 33 years of newsroom experience.
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