The secret to Jimmy O'Brien's success: Don't think, just do it

MAKING STRIDES: Leinster and Ireland's Jimmy O'Brien. Pic: ©INPHO/Nick Elliott

The accepted wisdom used to have it that players needed a decent stint on deck before finding their feet in Test rugby. 

Jimmy O’Brien’s eight caps with Ireland this last 12 months have gone and blown that out of the water.

The Leinster back has made a habit of fitting in without fuss. It started with his Ireland debut against the Springboks a year ago when he was chucked in for a debut less than half-an-hour into the game after an injury to Robbie Henshaw.

First cap at outside-centre, done. A week later and he was starting at full-back against Fiji. Grand, next? An 80-minute stint on the wing against the Wallabies? Cool. It was all equal parts brilliant and ridiculous. A rubix cube nailed in seconds, with one hand.

This is a guy who has started at 13, 15 and on both wings for Leinster but if this versatility, and the excellence he brings to every game, is embedded by now then it still bears reminding what he did in the World Cup quarter-final loss to New Zealand last month.

Ireland were eight points down with 23 minutes to go when he replaced the injured Mack Hansen at the Stade de France. This was as intense and unforgiving an environment as it gets for a player making his entrance and he did it cold.

A shoulder injury suffered in the last warm-up game against Samoa in Bayonne meant that he hadn’t seen a minute of action in the tournament up to that point. Seven weeks had passed. A sweltering summer had given way to the first fringes of winter.

But O’Brien slotted straight in. Like a plug slotted into a socket, he delivered an instant jolt of electricity. His 68 metres made was bettered by only five other players on the park that night, none of whom played less than 75 minutes.

He doesn’t survive when thrown in at the deep end, he thrives. But how?

“I try not to make a big fuss about it, I try to get on with it. I try not to get in my own way, or get in my own head, or overthink anything. Personally I was just going on against New Zealand, it was another game of rugby when I got on the pitch and the first moment settled me down.

“The lads around me… I straight away asked Johnny [Sexton] the call, he told me the call and I just kind of get into it, not try and overthink it, overthink the whole occasion, and go into different positions, just ask the lads ‘what do you think’ if I don’t know, just be as calm as possible. If you’re panicking, they’ll start panicking that you don’t know what you’re doing.” 

It’s an approach he adopts off the pitch as well.

That shoulder injury could have been curtains for his World Cup hopes. He needed an MRI and an x-ray when the team returned home from Bayonne but sandwiched in between was the squad announcement. He got in. He had earned that bit of trust.

There was still a long road to travel. O’Brien was the only man in the 33-man squad not to see any action up to that New Zealand game. News of his problem only emerged deep into the tournament but he insists there was no bubbling sense of frustration through all this.

“You’re in a small group that is tight-knit. Everyone is frustrated when they are not playing but I don’t think that got into the group at all. You can be personally frustrated but that’s not going to help anyone going around moping around. I don’t think that seeped in.” 

The World Cup was kept at a distance once Ireland exited. He did go back over the All Blacks tape on his return but the last four knockout games played out without his attention. He made for New York instead.

Eighty minutes away to Dragons last Sunday was his first dip back in the provincial pool where Leinster are operating minus Johnny Sexton and Stuart Lancaster and still awaiting the arrival of Jacques Nienaber.

Sexton’s influence has been well-flagged down the years but Lancaster’s role was enormous through seven years at the club, not least for O’Brien whose first year in the academy coincided with the Englishman’s arrival.

“There is change, but you get used to every year, in the squad, there are people retiring, new lads coming in. There are young lads here [and it is] the first time I’ve met a few of them, so you have to get to know them.

“So there is change every year. Obviously Johnny who was a massive part of it and Stu, but you just have to keep going, and kind of rumbling on. There are games coming up, you can’t really dwell on it.”