Cool CJ Stander was a bundle of nerves before Ireland debut

His body may have been telling him otherwise but CJ Stander was ready to go again last Monday, desperate to be picked by Ireland for a second time, eager to prove he belongs in Test rugby.

The previous afternoon he had answered that question to the satisfaction of the thousands who endorsed Donal Lenihan’s judgement that the 25-year-old back rower had been the Six Nations man of the match in Ireland’s bruising draw with Wales.

His lung-bursting performance, with a team-leading 23 carries against an immensely physical side, belied his status as a Test debutant and suggested a player wonderfully adaptable to the rigours of high-intensity Six Nations rugby. What is more the Munster back row enjoyed every minute of it, so much so that had he been required to do the same again 24 hours later he would have dragged his aching body through a brick wall to do so.

“I got a few good knocks but the recovery and the systems are so good with Ireland, as they are with Munster,” said Stander.

“We had a walk through on Monday and by that stage I was trying to get into the team again. My body was really low but if they’d have asked me to play on Monday I would have played again.”

The additional five days’ rest before the championship is resumed in Paris today against France will do Stander no harm and if he picks up at Stade de France where he left off at the Aviva Stadium last Sunday then Ireland supporters could be in for another barnstorming turn.

Yet talking to the Irish Examiner on Thursday after he had been named in Joe Schmidt’s starting XV at blindside flanker for the second week in a row, Stander admitted that prior to his tour de force against the Welsh, he had been a bundle of nerves, worried about whether he had what it takes to be a successful Test rugby player. So unsure of whether he would make the matchday squad, he told his family back in South Africa not to waste the journey.

“We’d been training the whole week, swapping in and out at 6. Say we did four plays, I would do two and someone else would do two, so I wasn’t sure. That’s why I told my parents not to come over.

“When Joe read out the team 1 to 15, he said Devin Toner and then I heard ‘CJ’. I felt like I was being called out for a school team, ‘That’s me!’

“There was satisfaction, but then suddenly almost like a fear coming over me. I was looking in my notebook, the stuff I’d written down all week, just to make sure I had everything, but everything in my head was ‘it’s my first cap, just enjoy it and work hard’.

“The last two weeks in the run-up, it’s your first cap, you want to make an impression but you don’t want to overload with talk or too much stuff.

“Even when I got selected I was still stressed. ‘Am I good enough to do this?’ ‘What’s going to happen in the match, how am I going to react?’ Some matches you get into it and you don’t really get the ball or the chance to tackle so you never know what the situation is going to be.

“But as I sang the anthems and got onto the pitch this calmness just came over me and I said to myself, ‘This is just another match, I need to play as I do,’ and it came together nicely in the end.”

France represents a chance for Stander to rise to the challenge once more. He is relishing the opportunity.

“We’ve played in France with Munster and it’s a difficult place to play. The French are very emotional people and when the crowd gets behind them it’s very difficult to play against them. I reckon when you get out there you need to play your game and start as hard as you can, as good as you can.

“It’s been a challenging week. We played on a Sunday and we play again on Saturday but it was well-structured and we did our stuff. We can’t use that as an excuse, we’ve just got to get out there and play our game. All of us have played numerous games in France and I’m looking forward to it,” said Stander.

“They’re big ball-carriers and they work hard and you need to front up and make your first hits count because if you slip off, all of them offload like they’re sevens players.

“So that’s two threats, they carry hard and they offload, so make the tackles count and make sure they don’t play the ball.

“Against Stade (Francais in the Champions Cup) away Jonathan Danty for two of their tries he was just carrying, offloading, carrying, offloading, he never went to the deck. So that’s what we have to look out for. All of them are good players and offloaders. It’s going to be challenging but we’ve worked hard this week, the few days we got, and it’s going to be a good match-up.”