There was a nice appreciative piece on O’Driscoll in today’s Guardian.
Brian O’Driscoll adds value as Ireland begin to feel at home
[i]Amid a great team performance by Ireland, there was a superb individual achievement by the captain Brian O’Driscoll[/i]
Richard Williams
Set aside, for a moment, those laments for England’s failure to turn the seeds of winter into healthy spring shoots and turn instead to the blossoming of rugby virtues displayed by the men in green in Dublin on Saturday. A thumping victory for Ireland seemed all the sweeter for coming at the end of a frustrating season, in which so much was allowed to slip from their grasp.
And amid sensational performances from Jonathan Sexton, David Wallace and others, including an unfancied front row and a seemingly ageless pair of locks, came a moment of personal triumph for their captain. Brian O’Driscoll’s dart across the line seven minutes into the second half gave him a 25th Six Nations try, eclipsing a record set between 1924 and 1933 by Ian Smith, the Australian-born ‘Flying Scotsman’ who captained the side to the Triple Crown in his final season.
Imagine that: a record which had stood since the year Hitler came to power in Germany and Astaire and Rogers danced together for the first time in Flying Down to Rio. How fitting, if such a mark had to be overtaken, that it should be done by an authentically great player.
In terms of his scavenger’s nose and driving power, O’Driscoll’s 25th touchdown was every bit as good as his very best. When the ball went to ground 15 metres from England’s line, he was there to scoop it up and dash with that unstoppable low-slung acceleration that not even the burly Nick Easter’s attempt at a tackle could interrupt.
Invited to rank it among the highlights of his 11-year international career, O’Driscoll declined. “It’s a nice thing to think about, but I’ve never been one for individual accolades,” he said. “Today was a day for enjoying a victory as a team. Individual accolades are for when you’ve finished, and I hope I’ve got a little bit left in me yet.”
Declan Kidney, who first coached him at schoolboy level and then as part of the victorious team at the Under-19 World Cup in 1998, certainly hopes so. “I’m delighted for him,” the head coach said. “Brian doesn’t care who gets the tries but on a personal level he’s playing very well and he’s been a very good captain over some very difficult matches in the past 12 months. He’s stayed steadfast to the team and he’s let them know in no uncertain terms how much this team means to him. I think some of the players have fed off that.”
O’Driscoll made his Six Nations debut in 2000, the year after his senior debut for Leinster as a 20-year-old. In his first international season he scored a hat-trick of tries against France, announcing himself as an competitor of the highest quality, before going on to lead his country to Triple Crowns in 2004, 2006 and 2007 as well as the yearned-for grand slam of 2009, Ireland’s first in 61 years. Saturday marked his 112th cap, and his 75th Test as captain.
As he noted, the win seemed to breathe life into the shiny new stadium. “The crowd was fantastic,” he said. "Since we’ve been back here we haven’t given them a performance or the results that they’ve been looking for. We wanted to set down a marker that we were back home and that the Aviva is a place where people can come and get a lot of excitement and entertainment. I think we did that today.
“All we were capable of doing was putting in a performance that we felt we owed ourselves. I didn’t believe we’d become a bad team in the space of a year. We just weren’t as clinical as maybe we had been in the past. We were a million miles away in some of the other performances. Today the ball just stuck, but there’s no point in having a big performance once every five or six games, and hopefully we can push on from here.”
Ireland could finish no better than third in the final Six Nations table, behind not just England on points but France on points difference, forcing the head coach to reflect on their failures as much as their success on Saturday. “We still have to take a look at how come we’ve been losing matches by narrow margins – France by three points, South Africa by two and Wales by six – and we’ll see if we can balance the books,” Kidney said. “Today the things we’ve been talking about for the past four or five weeks went right.”
As a result, their display against England was perhaps the only one of the entire tournament that seemed to come from a team prepared for the sterner challenges that lie ahead in New Zealand this autumn. Which may have been a bit of an illusion, but is not without its own particular value.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learnt over the past couple of years,” Kidney concluded, “it’s that if you’re going to win a match, win your last one. Because that can carry you through the months to come.” And if it doesn’t, there’s always Brian O’Driscoll.
