Tommy O’Donnell ready to kick on with Ireland at Six Nations

The Rugby World Cup? Forget it.

Coulda, shoulda, woulda: none of it matters now.

O’Donnell spoke yesterday about drawing a line through that day in Cardiff when the cameras seemed to spend almost as much time on the row of injured Irish stars sat high in the stands as they did on the action during that quarter-final defeat to Argentina.

He was by then already recuperating back home in Ireland, the cruel and crippling hip injury suffered in the warm-up against Wales in Dublin depriving him of a place in Joe Schmidt’s squad at a time when he was in the form of his life.

The surprise is that he didn’t blot out the action as it unravelled in the UK.

Other players might have unplugged the box for the month or sat disconsolate on a beach in Spain.

Not O’Donnell, he soaked it all up, and he enjoyed it too.

And the nature of his demise actually helped.

The fact it could have spelled the end of his career afforded him perspective and he embarked on a sensible rehab that didn’t overdo the weights or the chocolate.

Whatever he did it worked and he ended up returning for Munster a month ahead of schedule.

So O’Donnell clocked back in with Ireland this week on the back of five performances for his province, clocking up 80 minutes in the last two, though he admits that he has yet to hit either peak form or fitness as the opening Six Nations tie of the year, against Wales, shifts into view.

“It only feels like a couple of weeks ago when we were in pre-season and getting ready for the World Cup.

“So it is a familiar feeling to come back in and you slip back into it naturally, you come back in to the calls. It is natural you slip into and get into that terminology and it is nice to be in it.”

His return comes attached with no guarantees. He knows that.

It was the Six Nations opener against Italy last year that appeared to signal his big breakthrough.

With Sean O’Brien falling foul of fitness in the warm-up, O’Donnell was parachuted in and scored a try in a superb all-round display.

A week later and he didn’t even make the bench and his only action thereafter in the championship came in the shape of 55 minutes against England after O’Brien’s run of injury misfortunes nobbled him yet again.

“You just learn to deal with it,” he says. “I have learned that. It is all about your mental resilience, your resolve, and working hard with Enda (McNulty) has helped me with that.

“Just because you played well and were not selected does not count against you.

“If you have played well, you just need to go out there and do it again.”

Little needs to be said about the scramble for positions in Ireland’s ridiculously competitive back row.

The arrival into camp of O’Donnell’s Munster colleague CJ Stander means that even Jamie Heaslip finally faces serious competition for the No.8 jersey.

As a seven, O’Donnell’s task is all the harder for the fact that Sean O’Brien is the normal incumbent. The Leinster flanker, a live candidate for the captaincy, will be harder to shift than any opposition jackal at ruck time.

Yet this is a season even longer than normal. Most of his peers will likely be working off fumes come the three-Test summer tour to South Africa.

O’Donnell should be running at optimum speed by then though that is for another day.

“I don’t want to get too far ahead because I’m only a couple of weeks back from injury and I need to focus on myself because it happened me before: I came back, had a couple of games and all of a sudden you’re sliding off because you stopped focusing on those little details.

“I’m just wholly focused on week to week and being better, focusing on techniques.

“There are lots of things for us to be working on to be good at, whether its rucks or tackling, and we need to be the best across all of those in the Six Nations if we’re to retain it.”