Sean O'Brien busy building case for defence ahead of Jacques Nienaber's arrival

O’Brien has worked under an eclectic and international mix of coaches at the club and he understands the benefit of building on that with a Springbok point of view

Contact skills coach Sean O'Brien and James Ryan during Leinster rugby squad training.

The sense of a club season gathering steam was inescapable around UCD yesterday as Leinster’s Ireland contingent, minus the retired Johnny Sexton, clocked back in for club duties just over three weeks on from that World Cup quarter-final agony in Paris.

Three of them had already returned to the coop seven days previously but the reappearance of the other 14 was a clear signal that, after three opening URC rounds, we are turning into a period of heavy lifting between interpros and the Champions Cup.

Sean O’Brien will be comfortable with the workload.

If he had a brass name plate on his office door at Leinster it would read ‘skills and contact coach’ but the former back row has been holding the defence brief as well this season while the province awaits the arrival of Jacques Nienaber from South Africa.

Busy, busy, then. Just as he likes it. That aside, O’Brien is back playing junior rugby with his beloved Tullow – his first game, against Suttonians, coming at out-half due to an injury crisis - where he is also serving this season as Director of Rugby.

Add to that a farm down home that needs minding, some more coaching in Naas and god knows what else and it’s probably a good thing that he professes to needing no more than five or six hours sleep a night.

“I’ve always been busy, I’ve always liked that. I don’t like sitting still for too long.” Nienaber should be landing in Dublin soon enough but there has been limited enough communication between the pair until now. Understandable given the South African was hoping to beat so many of his new Leinster charges to the Webb Ellis so recently.

O’Brien has worked under an eclectic and international mix of coaches at the club - from Michael Cheika, through Joe Schmidt, Matt O’Connor and Stuart Lancaster – and he understands the benefit of building on that with a Springbok point of view.

There was one text after last weekend’s defeat of Edinburgh at the RDS to the tune of ‘great effort and energy, the D was good’ but it will be intriguing to see what stamp the new man can put on the department now that the season is already up and running.

“We have definitely tried to bring a bit more linespeed, in terms of my own system, when we have the opportunity to do that but we are definitely not defending like the Springboks do. That’s been made clear to the lads, I’ve spelled that out to them.

“Whether we do that or not when Jacques comes in is a different story because our defensive system in general has been really good over the last few years and we have scrambled really well and worked really hard.

“That will be his own thing, whatever stamp he wants to put on it, but I’m sure he’ll marry up some of the stuff that is already in place, some of the fundamentals of our ‘D’, with some new stuff that he wants to introduce.” O’Brien is confident that Leinster’s smart and experienced squad will be able to adapt to whatever ideas Nienaber wants to introduce in the short term but he will have to adapt as much as anyone when the South African starts.

Coaching tickets, like teams, tend to be moveable feasts - as the departure of Stuart Lancaster and the appointment of Nienaber attest to - but O’Brien has had a taste of greater responsibility now and he is clearly eager to better himself as time goes on.

“Yeah, I’m happy. It’s a funny one because when Jacques comes in I will go back to the contact and breakdown. In a way, I will have to sit behind Jacques and the other coaches in terms of going to the next level because the progression for me would be a full defensive role at some point. So I still have to learn my trade.

“I am a year-and-a-half into coaching at this level so I am aware of that. I am having great conversations with [Andrew Goodman] on the attack side as well. I like doing both sides of the ball and it is just learning at the minute for me, from the coaches around me and from the lads coming back from [Ireland] camp and the bits and pieces they would have learned.”