Vincent Hogan: Time for new warriors to step forward
Paul O'Connell takes over as Ireland captain from Brian O'Driscoll but the team needs some new leaders to emerge
THE last time Ireland won a Six Nations game with Brian O’Driscoll sitting in the stand, George Best was alive.
Chances are he even watched the easy filleting of an abject Scotland team while sipping white wine in his Surbiton local. George’s health had yet to take the calamitous turn that would prove terminal just over nine months later in November 2005.
O’Driscoll and Best belong together in a minute assembly of sports people from this island whose names have a global recognition factor.
You sometimes forget the colour that drink siphoned out of George’s life, thieving us of a figure routinely spoken of in the same breath as Pele and Maradona. He became the ultimate fallen angel. One of the world’s most beautiful footballers, doomed to an early middle-age, most of it spent lost, arm in arm with his mortality.
Who else of Best’s calibre can we lay claim to? For a mesmerising 18 months, maybe Padraig Harrington flew close. And Rory McIlroy now clearly has a chance. There was a time when Sonia O’Sullivan’s career seemed to have blown in off the pages of a fairytale. We have long been blessed with the best horsemen and women on the planet.
DISTINGUISHED
Footballers like Jennings, Giles, Brady, McGrath and Roy Keane would have distinguished any league in the world. And the GAA has been home to some of the greatest rugby and soccer players that might have been. But absolute, incontrovertible genius?
Today will carry an odd dynamic around Lansdowne Road. O’Driscoll’s absence from the entire Six Nations tournament suddenly brings into focus the scale of our dependency on a man universally acknowledged as the world’s greatest centre. Through his career, he has missed just five games in 12 Championships and been part of four Triple Crown wins plus, of course, a Grand Slam.
But here’s the thing. In the history of Six Nations rugby, Ireland have yet to record a victory over Wales, England or France without O’Driscoll on the field. The guy hasn’t just been our captain; he’s been our comfortblanket. So something fundamental is being asked of Declan Kidney and his team now. A question, essentially, about cojones.
O’Driscoll is 33 and recuperating from surgery on a part of his anatomy that seems to have taken more punishment than the hull of the Costa Concordia. There can be no guarantee that, come summer, his rehabbed neck/ shoulder will allow him resume at that characteristically epic tempo. Unpalatable as it might seem, the wise thing is to start planning for life after ‘BOD’.
And that won’t be any simple process of succession. Because O’Driscoll isn’t just the best rugby player to represent Ireland, he is also – indisputably – the hardest.
Those marquee hat-tricks against France (2000) and Scotland (’02) or that slaloming try for the Lions (’01) highlighted all the technical accomplishment (quicksilver feet, magician’s hands, low centre of gravity), but his greatness found loudest expression on the creaking days of grim attrition. Remember England at Croke Park three years ago? Grand Slam year? Remember how he became a lightning rod for every dark impulse Martin Johnson’s men could summon? Yet, he made himself the difference.
O’Driscoll scored a try and dropgoal that day. He didn’t just face down the bullies, he handed them back to Johnson in a bag. A week before the Lions left for South Africa that summer, I met him while working on Eddie O’Sullivan’s autobiography. As we chatted in the Montrose Hotel, he confided that his shoulder was really in no condition for the ferocity of combat looming on the High Veldt.
The weeks ahead, he admitted, would be about “managing” that inconvenience. You try to reconcile that reality with his hit on Danie Rossouw in the second Test. Rossouw is 6’6” and 19 stone. Yet O’Driscoll launched himself so furiously at the vast Springbok second-row, their heads collided, putting both men down like over-matched prize-fighters.
That’s the only way O’Driscoll knows and the reason why, north and south of the equator, he is so revered. His absence from this Six Nations forces Kidney now to find a way forward without, unequivocally, the most influential player in our history.
The last time that happened an Irish coach, after the infamous ‘spear tackle’ in ’05, the team plunged into temporary meltdown in the Autumn Internationals. True, there is a difference now. Kidney has the luxury of replacing one Lions captain with another and, if any Irish player shares O’Driscoll’s competitive ferocity, it is probably Paul O’Connell.
But, statistically, Ireland in the Six Nations without O’Driscoll (40pc win rate) tends to be a different proposition to Ireland with him (73pc win rate). We’ve leaned on him enough. Time for new warriors to step forward.
QUESTION OF THE WEEK
THE penal fines handed down to Derrytresk and Dromid Pearses this week certainly fulfil the optical requirement of severe penalties for that Portlaoise brawl of January 29.
But how exactly does a €5,000 fine for one of the smallest junior clubs in Ireland get paid? The reality is, without outside assistance, it doesn’t. Indeed, on that subject, is there not something incongruous about the GAA imposing massive fines on amateur members?
Come to think of it, in the strictest sense, is it even legal?
THOUGHT OF THE WEEK COLLEAGUE
Martin Breheny’s guide to becoming a millionaire in 13 weeks with a €100 accumulator on the upcoming National Leagues looked built on pretty sturdy logic last Wednesday.
Just wondering had ‘Breheny Beat’ the courage of its convictions? As a public service duty, we plan to report any suspicious behavioural changes in said precinct next May. Shouldn’t be difficult.
- Vincent Hogan
