Let’s have one for the road: Winning the perfect Slam

MAYBE he thinks differently now, but the day before the most wonderful of games in a wonderful weekend’s Heineken Cup rugby, Conor O’Shea expressed the view to this writer in a Galway hotel that home field advantage in rugby was totally exaggerated

We weren’t so much speaking in the context of his Harlequins team’s clash with Connacht in the Showgrounds the following day as the upcoming Six Nations Championship for which the affable O’Shea will again be offering his insights to the nation from the vantage point of the RTÉ studios. Irish rugby, he believed, was best positioned of the home nations to make an impact in the championship.

To win it outright was a very realistic target for this group of players, and while they were at it, a Grand Slam was there for the taking too.