'We had a chat at half-time and knew there was no panic'

RUGBY:SEÁN O'BRIEN, not for the first time this season, stands straight, looks ahead and gives us ample opportunity to study his face. You look at him. He looks back and without doubt he is thinking: "What the hell will they ask me this time? What the hell are they looking at?"

A graze here and there, a mild rash on one side and a puckered wound in the corner of his right eye, the blood now turning black is what you see from two feet. If O’Brien was a boxer his world title fight next Saturday in Thomond Park against Munster would not go ahead. First blow it would open unless doctors possess skin-welding machines.

O’Brien’s face, as it always does, appears to have mapped out his match contribution. The flanker has grown in stature faster than any Leinster player in recent years, his face as available for gaining yards as his shoulders and limbs. A little reshuffle in the second half with Shane Jennings entering the game at openside flanker and O’Brien switching to six had a marked effect. That, a tweaked scrum and a blended mix of self-belief and desperation has him here, inadvertently displaying the trophy cuts and bruises of a backrow forward.

“Yeah, I went to six,” he says. “It’s a different ball game. It gives me more space to carry. At seven I’m tied up a bit more and for second phase I can’t get my hands on the ball. I got my hands on a lot of ball in the second half and started to carry well.

“We were just forcing things in the first half, trying 50-50 passes and not looking after the ball. It was as simple as that. We had a chat at half-time and knew there was no panic and that we could score at any stage. We just held onto the ball and started running at them and working harder than them and it worked out well.”

Looking after the jersey, looking after the basics are sacred rugby rites. Looking after the ball is a recurring parable. It is the 11th commandment and Leinster were breaking it. But there was a team consensus at half-time if they could just stop being outrageous sinners then hell was no certainty.

O’Brien believed.

“We spoke about it. We did. We can win these games,” he says. “Holes were opening up for us in the first half even and it was just spilled balls or whatever. Yeah, there is a massive belief in this squad and we never doubted ourselves. Obviously we weren’t happy with the way we were playing. We were pissed off with it but we came back well.”

Relief, he says was his first reaction to winning. “You know what you have put in the last 10 months,” he explains.

Had he ever played a game like it?

“I don’t think I have,” he says before sucking away the magical properties and sweeping emotion of the success. “I still believe it was our own mistakes that were giving them the opportunities. We weren’t smart enough in the first half.”

The Tullow man is not for turning.