Hickie welcomes Slam challenge

IT’S a good indication of how many international matches Ireland play these days that left wing Denis Hickie will be winning his 38th cap against England on Sunday.

The 27-year-old has had his career regularly interrupted by injury since he made a try-scoring debut against Wales in 1997.

Now, he is one of the senior players in the Irish squad going into this game. He certainly took his responsibilities on board when making that dramatic charge-down of an attempted dropped goal by Stephen Jones in the dying seconds of last week’s game in Cardiff. He is now relishing what lies ahead this Sunday.

Hickie is convinced the pressure on the Irish side against Wales was a lot greater than it will be on Sunday. He points to the expectation levels among Irish supporters in Cardiff, whereas they now have home comforts at Lansdowne Road and are the outsiders against England.

There are suggestions that one of the touch judges, New Zealander Paddy O’Brien, considered Hickie to be a foot offside in blocking Jones’s kick but was unable to convey that message to referee Steve Lander because communications between them had broken down. At this remove, of course, the Irishman couldn’t care less.

“Given the way Jones hit the previous drop-kick, I thought there was a pretty good chance he’d knock that one over as well,” said Hickie.

“To be honest, there wasn’t a whole lot going through my mind. At that stage, we were out on our feet, so I just concentrated on getting to the ball and I was lucky it struck my hand.

“The pressures between the two games are so different. When you find yourself on the verge of doing something really good, it’s a lot more nerve-wracking and there’s a lot more pressure than when it comes down to one game. So in a peculiar way, we had more to lose last week than on Sunday.

"As a professional, it’s important to try and do your best against a team as formidable as England. It’s always good when you play against a really good side to see if you measure up both individually and collectively. That’s the kind of challenge we have this week. I suppose we’ve played well in patches and not so well in others. A Grand Slam game is new for us but not for England. We haven’t faced that challenge yet.”

Understandably, there are people who believe being closeted in camp for the best part of two weeks is not the way for young men to prepare for a game of this significance, that they should be able to get away from rugby for a while, play golf or watch the snooker championship currently taking place at their City West headquarters. However, Hickie seems happy with his lot.

“When you get to the last match of a championship, you still do the things you did all along. You get into a routine no matter what the game. It’s very Irish in a way, although when it needs to be planned out, it is planned out.

“But when we have time off, we are allowed to do what we want. We are not forced to do anything,” he said.

“March has just disappeared. It seems only recently that we were getting together and training on freezing pitches for our first game. We couldn’t even get a pitch in Scotland when we got over there the weather was so cold.

“We are now training in the sun in Dublin south. The time has passed really fast, although I suppose it passes even faster when things are going well.”