RUGBY: GERRY THORNLEYtalks to Ireland's inspirational secondrow who plans to forget past personal disappointments and help Ireland finish their Six Nations campaign with a win

NO ONE can be happier to be merely playing again, but then again, Paul O’Connell could be happier. He endured the longest lay-off of his career, a nine-month absence brought about by a groin infection that took several diagnoses before it could be corrected, and while he has increasingly looked back to his best, his comeback hasn’t exactly been without its hiccups.

No sooner did he return off the bench for Munster in December than he was red-carded for a retaliatory off-the-ball swipe of his arm at Jonathan Thomas and received a four-game ban.

Pitched into the penultimate Euro pool match in Toulon, he was part of the defeat which ensured Munster’s first group exit in 13 years.

Then there’s been Ireland’s Six Nations campaign. Ho-hum.

“It’s been frustrating; very frustrating,” he repeats, and this is the most repeated word of our interview in the Killiney Castle Hotel during the week. The word crops up again, and again.

“With Munster I only came back and played two games and then the Toulon game was a bad day for us, one of the worst days in a long time.

“With Ireland it’s been frustrating because – people may not believe it or see it – but at times I think we’ve played really well, as well as we’ve ever played since I’ve been involved. But we haven’t done it for 80 minutes, or for anything close to 80 minutes, and that’s really where we need to get to.”

He admits that his prolonged absence was the longest nine months of his career, not least because the initial prognosis was for a two-week absence, before a failed pain-killing injection on the morning the Heineken Cup quarter-final against Northampton prompted the first of several reappraisals.

“Everyone has long-term injuries, but when you don’t know how long-term it’s going to be . . . A guy gets a knee injury and he knows he’s out for three months. At least straightaway you start planning.

“You start doing your rehab, you start working on weaknesses you’re able to work on; you might plan one or two holidays throughout it at different stages and you can even target a match six months away that you hope you can be back for but the reason it was so annoying for me is I never had that. I didn’t help myself by tagging on another four weeks at the end of it,” he says dryly with a smile.

The worst stage of the nine months was toward the end. The nearer his comeback came, the further it seemed to get away by another unscheduled week or two. If nothing else, it gave him sympathy for his partner Emily and her pregnancy, though the birth of Paddy last April couldn’t have been better timed for him.

“A saving grace,” he says, in every sense, as it came during a spell when he was unable to train at all and was confined to physiotherapy three times a week due to the medication he was undergoing.

As the “non-playing” Munster captain O’Connell was often obliged to front up at press conferences and the like, while on match days the cameras trailed him in suit and tie. Nice suit, but still a suit, and he also looked to be going through purgatory.

“For anyone who has watched a game with my dad now they’d know that that’s what I’m like. I got very frustrated and sorry for the lads when we weren’t playing well, I suppose because you know how much goes into it.”

Public obligations, such as “pressers”, made him feel like an imposter, a feeling he also had in Munster’s pre-season training camp in Portugal.

“There was a lot of contact work in training and you do really get a great feeling from whatever they call it, endorphin release; they would be killing each other in training and they’d all be in such good form in the evenings. It was just hard to be around at times.

“But as it’s a pre-season tour you have meetings and you’re offering your opinions, but yet you’re not doing the hard work with the lads during the day.”

During the hiatus, he heard the rumours of his imminent demise as a rugby player.

“Rumours and Irish rugby has gone incredible. I don’t know would I believe anything I hear about anyone anymore. But I never doubted it. It’s not that I had to have a positive mindset, it was that I had a fecking infection and I had to get rid of it. Certain anti-biotics didn’t work and certain things I reacted badly to. I knew once I got rid of it then I’d be fine.”

For all the changes in the tackle laws, he does not think the game had essentially changed in his absence, or that it demanded higher levels of anaerobic fitness as against physical strength.

The lowest point since his return was the red card against the Ospreys and the ensuing four-game ban.

“We had our backs to the wall a bit with Munster at the time. I wasn’t available for four weeks when I would have been coming in some way fresh and hopefully give the team a bit of an impetus. So I suppose I let the boys down a little bit. If it was something one of the other lads did, I’d probably kill them for it,” he admits, smiling, in further self-recrimination.

This has also delayed his own return to form in the last couple of games, while Ireland's performances have been so similar they've almost been like Groundhog Day.

They’ve started like a train in each of their last three games, only to start spluttering to a filling station for a refill.

“We’ve been happy to trade scores with teams a little bit. It’s just something that the top teams don’t do. When they’re playing well they keep playing well, they keep driving it on. But I think we can get to there.”

It’s not, he notes, as if Ireland have been scoring all their points “by knocking the ball through the posts” and most of what’s been missing is within their control.

Some of their rugby has, he maintains, been the best he’s known in his time with Ireland.

“We’re not in a perfect place, by any means, but I think we’re in a good place in that there’s just a few things that need to be tweaked – maybe a little bit mentally, maybe a little bit of what we’re doing on the pitch, and then I think we’ll be flying it.”

O’Connell was reared in a winning culture at Young Munster and especially Munster, with whom he made his debut in 2001, although there would be some pain along the way until the Heineken Cup triumphs of 2006 and ’08. So what is winning rugby?

“A big part of it is when you’re playing well, capitalising, and not trading scores with teams. When we’re playing well, we need to keep playing well, and not be happy to have our shot at playing well and ‘now let’s see what the other team have’. You need to maintain pressure on teams and we’ve released the pressure.”

And if that means kicking it for 80 minutes, so be it, and if it means running for 80 minutes, so be it. “We’re not trying to expand our game to put bums on seats. But at the same time if Rog (O’Gara) or Jonny (Sexton) look up and there’s loads of space there, I hope they’re kicking it every time. That’s why some days you kick the ball a lot, and that’s why some days you don’t kick as much, and hopefully it’s because you’re making good decisions.”

Throw in the Grand Slam in 2009, and you have to feel – sod the World Cup for a moment – this Six Nations represented either the last chance or one of the last chances for some of this team. “Yeah . . . we’re not going to be around for much longer. And that’s 100 per cent part of the frustration, that this year we had a big chance, and it’s not like we’ve played badly for the whole Six Nations.”

What’s more, you have to wonder, or worry, if Irish rugby has reached the mountain top, and that there’s only one direction from there.

“I’m not worried,” says O’Connell. “I think that there’s a few of us who will be around for a few more years, but at the same time I see the potential coming through in Munster, obviously in Leinster and also in Ulster – for example, people don’t realise Stephen Ferris is still only 25 – and the other guys who have come through as leaders as well.

“I think Irish rugby is in a good state and long after the O’Driscolls and the Wallaces and the O’Garas are gone we’ll still be competing for Grand Slams.”

He played against Martin Johnson a couple of times, regarding him as a great player in his time and a good man – hence he’s not surprised at the gradual evolution of a potential slam-winning English side, with good set-pieces, hard graft at the breakdown and with some game-breaking backs.

“He seems to be a real winner in everything he does and I’d have a lot of respect for him.”

However, the source of motivation today is not about stopping England. “You don’t want to be heading to the World Cup looking to find your form. We need to know it’s there heading into our summer preparation.”

There’s also a sense of owing the Irish supporters one, and in these straitened times for clubs and country, that there will be a vocal home majority of fans. O’Connell recalls his first and only appearance in the Aviva to date.

“When we came out for the photo against France we were booed, because there were more French supporters in the ground than Irish. For me, playing in the Aviva for the first time, that was a bit of a strange thing. I believe we need to give the crowd something to shout about as well. We need to bring the crowd into the game. But at times it’s a little bit the other way around as well. When a team has their back to the wall, they need their crowd as well. Hopefully against England we’ll have a serious atmosphere there.”

Ireland could do with that, along with an 80-minute performance and a win.

And no one more so than O’Connell himself.