Sean O’Brien sees bigger picture

If there was one bum note that accompanied Ireland’s comprehensive Six Nations opener in Rome last week, then it was the camera shots of Sean O’Brien sitting glum-faced in the Stadio Olimpico stands as the Italy game passed him by.

Named to make his first start for Ireland since November of 2013 after his long-standing shoulder problems, it was O’Brien’s hamstrings that let him down in the warm-up and he was forced to vacate his place in the back row.

So near, yet so far.

“I knew it wasn’t too bad but I knew it wasn’t (so) great that I could go, ‘here, I’ll chance playing’, and end up tearing the whole hamstring off,” he said yesterday after confirmation that he has been given the nod against the French tomorrow.

“That was the call. I was honest with the doctor and I was honest with Joe (Schmidt). He said, ‘How is it?’ and I said, ‘It’s very, very tight’. I didn’t think I could run straightaway, either, so we just called it and that was it.”

Schmidt intimated afterwards it wasn’t likely to be something that would necessitate another long layoff and O’Brien confirmed as much yesterday. “If it was a World Cup final I could have played probably, yeah! But, I didn’t.”

None of that was apparent last Saturday as he stewed silently in that shiny, puffy IRFU jacket with his arms folded and his head tilted downwards, though he was chipper enough yesterday to see the funny side of that.

“I was actually looking at the monitor. I was checking the lineouts at the time on the monitor, so I was looking down at where we had gone wrong on two lineouts. It was a bad picture for everyone to see! They thought I was depressed! But I was very disappointed because I really wanted to play. I suppose I felt good all week and I was just so happy to be back involved and to be named in the starting team.

“And then for that to happen, it’s obviously going to...”

The rest is left unsaid but the important thing, for him and for Ireland, is that he is back — again — and ready to re-ignite on the field after banking just 53 minutes for the Wolfhounds late last month since early September.

He has done nothing different this week to accommodate the scare last Saturday. Sunday and Monday he spent getting the hamstring seen to by the physios so they didn’t bleed and by Tuesday he was back on the paddock at full tilt. He’s not the superstitious type either so there will be no change of lucky socks or set patterns altered before 5pm tomorrow as Ireland brace for a meeting with a physically powerful French team that trades in muscle more than magic these days.

“They are big, physical men and when you play against France you know you have played against France. Every test. I remember a World Cup warm-up game a few years back and it was the same thing: a big, hard, physical game.

“We know they can be unpredictable, that they can throw the ball around and they have threats everywhere. Their back three are like lightning so we can’t be giving them scraps. We can’t be sloppy in our approach.”

He is asked about some of those he is likely to be brushing up against this weekend and duly makes all the right noises about Thierry Dusautoir, Damien Chouly and Bernard Le Roux, but this game is more notable for the Irish players on duty. Rarely, if ever, has an Irish side welcomed France to Dublin with such an abundance of talent which is testament to the strength in depth engineered by Schmidt and to an injury roster that has dwindled to near empty in recent weeks. Andrew Trimble aside, there is no player absent through injury and the return to the bench of Cian Healy after his lengthy layoff means that Ireland are as close to fully locked and loaded as you can get in international rugby. O’Brien agrees that it may be the best he has played in.

“It probably is when you look at it. You look at our bench as well. It probably is the strongest team we’ve had in a long time. Obviously I’ve been missing for a good while now. It’s exciting and it’s good to see we have that strength in depth there now.”