Looking at him yesterday in his hour of glory it was impossible to forget the long road. Not just the 10 years since Brian O’Driscoll won his first cap for Ireland but the 12 months since he limped off against Wales in Croke Park with his captaincy under challenge and his brilliance under inquiry. Remember the uncontested doubt? The feeling that we might never see him again as we had always known him? Yesterday that memory was obliterated.
A season that started with quiet, unspoken hope finished in immortality. Long after we thought all the old gushing adjectives about O’Driscoll no longer had a life he revived them. Yesterday he was immense. Again. What would Warren Gatland say about him this morning? Twelve months ago the Wales coach suggested that O’Driscoll had lost a yard or two of pace. It may have been designed as a stink bomb but at the time O’Driscoll’s defenders weren’t in a position to argue. Somehow O’Driscoll’s explosiveness had been disarmed and because of that his threat was more easily parried.
He looked too big. Sluggish. From the end of the 2007 World Cup to the middle of the following June he went 19 matches without a try for club and country. His form wasn’t a matter of opinion: it was shot. And yet there he stood yesterday, bathed in the glory of a redemptive season, holding the prize that had driven this team and eluded them for the guts of a decade.
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The Twin Towers
The Twin Towers
