Closing the book on an incredible body of work
If the thought of Mr Indestructible having his career curtailed by injury jarred yesterday morning, then so did that: 72 feels like way too low a number for a man who was always there when the big days dawned and still standing when they ended.
Heaslip was a one-off.
The physicality inherent to the professional scene is such that players have come to accept that there will be periods, some small and others scarily long and seemingly never-ending, where they will be reduced to the status of observer.
Crutches and casts are 10 a penny.
Sean O’Brien is a decent example. The Carlow man has known some great days with Leinster and Ireland, but there has been frustration aplenty, as well. Days when he has looked on from afar at his friends and colleagues making history.
Currently sidelined with a hip injury, O’Brien has missed three of the six Celtic League finals Leinster have reached in his decade and more at the club and he managed just seven minutes off the bench against Glasgow Warriors in the 2014 decider.
Five years earlier, he got just 19 minutes as a reserve against Munster on an historic day in Croke Park and he wasn’t fit enough to play any part the following month when a Jamie Heaslip try got Leinster over the line for a first Heineken Cup.
With Ireland, O’Brien has had to endure the heartache of twiddling his thumbs throughout the successful 2014 Six Nations campaign and he’s leaving it late for any involvement this time, too. Oh, and he sat out a certain win in Chicago as well.
Keith Earls probably doesn’t feel much sympathy for him.
The Munster wing made his debut for Ireland before O’Brien but the vagaries of injury and form have been such for him that he missed out on all three of Ireland’s successful Six Nations campaigns since, as well as that defeat of the All Blacks.
Which brings us back to Heaslip.
Pluck a game out of the record books that Leinster or Ireland played from the time he made a debut for either of them until his last ever game of rugby, against Wales in Cardiff 11 months ago, and he both started and finished it.
Every single one.
Six Celtic League finals. Three Heineken Cup deciders and a Challenge Cup. That 41-35 win in Toulouse in 2006. The Lansdowne Road and Croke Park semi-finals against Munster. Heaslip played every minute of every single one.
When Ireland claimed Six Nations title in Cardiff in 2009, Paris in 2014 and Edinburgh in 2015, Heaslip clocked in for the full 80 minutes. New Zealand in Solder Field? Eighty minutes. Even his World Cup stats are ridiculous. Ireland played 10 games across the 2011 and 2015 editions. That’s 800 minutes in total and he played in 775 of them. Though the consummate professional, he was a relic from an era when only the grimmest of injuries resulted in a replacement.
Heaslip played under five head coaches with Leinster and Ireland — two Irishmen, two Aussies and a Kiwi — but it was another New Zealander who broke ranks by deeming him superfluous to his plans for the first and only time in his career.
Warren Gatland was as taken with Heaslip as every other coach before him when he trusted him throughout all 240 minutes of the British and Irish Lions Test series against South Africa in 2009 and again for the first meeting with Australia four years later.
But the Lions were 16-15 down in the second Test, in Melbourne, with 18 minutes to play, when Gatland called him ashore and the Kildare man watched the Test-clinching third encounter, in Sydney, from the stands after being omitted entirely from the 23.
The dropping of Brian O’Driscoll overshadowed it at the time, but the images of an unsmiling, contemplative Heaslip in his suit and tie and Lions padded jacket in the ANZ Stadium after the game captured his personal disappointment perfectly.
There was more to him than longevity and omnipresence, of course. Leo Cullen harked back yesterday to his try against the Tigers in 2009, his contribution in the miracle comeback against Northampton two years later and a vital turnover against Ulster in Twickenham in 2012, before the scoreboard tilted so definitively in their favour. Joe Schmidt picked out a memorable try against France nine years ago and a try and championship-saving tackle on Stuart Hogg in Murrayfield in 2015 among others. In quality and quantity, Heaslip is closing the book on an incredible body of work.
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