O’Driscoll looks back on missed opportunity

BRIAN O’DRISCOLL may be out of the game for the foreseeable future with injury but it is the “missed opportunity” that was the Rugby World Cup rather than any missed game time which will go down as his greatest regret of 2011.

Expectations were high inside the camp, and here at home, that Declan Kidney’s side could go further than any Irish outfit before them, and reach a World Cup semi-final at the least, after the pool defeat of Australia only for Wales to bring the party to a premature end.

“I kind of look back on just a massive missed opportunity,” O’Driscoll told Newstalk’s Tom Dunne yesterday.

“I don’t really allow myself think about it too much, because I don’t know when again an Irish team could have the route of a Wales, France quarter-semi into a World Cup final but we just didn’t do it on the day.

“I think they peaked. They played their best against us in that quarter-final and that’s it in knockout football when you get to that stage. It was just a huge, huge anti-climax, because we felt during the group stage we had got ourselves in a good place to really push hard.

“And when you get into a semi- final, all bets are off. It doesn’t matter about form. It’s just about the teams that turn up (on the day) and unfortunately we didn’t get to taste that. And all credit to Wales for performing the way they did and they probably should’ve been finalists themselves.”

It was a reflective O’Driscoll speaking on radio yesterday but the calendar year about to end was far from all doom and gloom for a man who tasted success in the Heineken Cup for the second time in three years last May.

Even injury even has its own silver lining, if a minor one. “I like Christmas but this is going to be my first Christmas in 12 now that I’ll be able to have a glass of wine on Christmas Day with my Christmas dinner and that’s going to be so novel. So that’s something I’m looking forward to. Every cloud and all that.”