Fear of flying home early drives Donncha

DONNCHA O’CALLAGHAN will go to the well again tomorrow against Italy having revealed his fear of a repeat of Ireland’s last World Cup campaign is a major motivating factor.

O’Callaghan is in a situation he thrives on as his side prepare for the Pool C clash at Otago Stadium: entering a do or die scenario with Irish backs against the wall, and playing with heart as much as head.

He was at the same juncture just two weeks ago as little-fancied Ireland readied themselves to topple Australia with a heady mixture of passion and inspiration that the relatively inexperienced Wallabies found difficult to cope with. And O’Callaghan, devastated at Ireland’s sorry exit from the 2007 tournament at the end of the pool stage, is hoping he and his cohorts can conjure a return of that special, Irish “X factor”, as he called it, in what promises to be a white-hot atmosphere under the roof between two passionate sides.

An emotional occasion? “It definitely will be,” O’Callaghan said yesterday. “We’re playing cup final stuff now. It’s 80 minutes on Sunday and that’s it.

“Being honest, it was the worst feeling ever coming away from the last World Cup and I’d do anything not to go through that experience again. That’s what drives me. I know it might seem to be negative but I would hate to have that feeling again.

“That France trip was (the lowest ebb). We were still scratching our heads. We don’t know what went on. We thought we were doing everything right.

“The flight out here takes ages, but the flight home is like 10 minutes, and you’re sitting at home thinking, ‘what went on here’, so yeah, that would drive me trying to avoid that horrible feeling.”

O’Callaghan, 32 and at his third World Cup alongside Munster second-row partner Paul O’Connell, said forwards coach Gert Smal had called on the Irish pack to embrace the big-match pressure in order to produce the type of passionate display that can get the job done against Italy and seal a place in the last eight.

“You can determine everything and just go out and perform,” he said. “For us, a massive thing is tapping into it. Gert has said it to us a few times, ‘I want that Irish performance’, where you can’t really put a finger on something. People might call it an X factor. You kind of know what he’s talking about when you have to go to well, and that’s what we have to do now.”

This is not a situation anyone in the Ireland camp, not least head coach Declan Kidney, failed to predict: not just that it would all come down to this final group game but also that it would be a straightforward equation — win or bust.

“To be fair,” O’Callaghan said, “Deccie’s said that from the start. He just said, ‘it’s a pool of five, everyone’s going on about bonus points and things like that, but I’m just interested in you winning matches’.

“A big mistake we made the last time, we were talking ourselves up. I don’t know if it’s an Irish thing but it doesn’t sit well with us. We’re better off when we’re ‘cap in hand’ I think.”