O’Driscoll relieved at finishing in one piece

Brian O’Driscoll last night described his "relief" at avoiding serious injury in his last game as a professional rugby as he began life after retirement with his first stint on air as part of Newstalk’s ‘Off the Ball’ team.

The ex-Leinster and Ireland player had announced earlier yesterday that he would be joining the station’s sports programme come September when the rugby season starts back again, just days after his farewell appearance.

It was, unfortunately, one reduced to less than nine minutes after he aggravated a long-standing calf injury early on in Leinster’s ultimately comfortable defeat of Glasgow Warriors in the RaboDirect PRO12 final at the RDS.

“It was hard to feel hard-done by because I got to win the Six Nations and I got to the (PRO12) final,” he said on the show.

“I was actually just relieved that it was only a soft tissue injury that finished my career.

“You’re always worried that in the last few games you might pick up a break or dislocation and the first five or six months of your retirement are curtailed because you can’t do anything. It was a little bit of a relief, in a weird way.”

Aside from his duties at Newstalk, where he will be used mostly as a rugby pundit but with an occasional co-presenting role and one that will allow him discuss other sports issues, O’Driscoll has other boxes to tick.

Skiing, squash and attending weddings seem to be chief among them right now.

It was a chipper O’Driscoll who chewed the fat last night, though one with a voice clearly showing the strain of an extended celebration on the back of Leinster’s latest win, and he killed outright any suggestions that he would be doing a Gavin Duffy and turning to the GAA.

Rugby will remain his focus, as he had always suggested.

In turning to punditry, he will have to find the line between saying it as he sees it and doing so in a way that is fair to players, many of whom he would have shared a dressing-room and certain confidences with down the years.

Gary Neville, late of Manchester United and now of Sky Sports, is the obvious role model there and it is to O’Driscoll’s advantage that he has always been one of the more fluent and interesting of speakers in front of a microphone.

“It’s a difficult one because I feel as an ex-player, and knowing next year I will be talking about my ex-teammates, there is a certain amount of responsibility largely because you know them a bit better than the guy on the street or people who have done punditry but who haven’t actually played the game.

“There are plenty of those out there too but I feel there is an onus on me to best represent them, particularly the guys I’ve been with in the Leinster set-up and Ireland set-up with, but you also have to be honest about what you see.

“It’s a fine line about getting it right, but there are ways and means of getting your point across without lambasting them from a personal point of view.”

As always, there were other interesting snippets from the man, among them the discussions he had with Mervyn Murphy, the Irish team’s senior video analyst, in an attempt to ensure that he was not becoming predictable as a player, especially in later years.

Three days was all he made us wait for his next move.

There will be more to come.