Open up any of the sport sections of the three Irish broadsheets and you'll read all about the prowess and skill of Munster's Peter O'Mahony. The man most likely to wear #6 for Ireland on Saturday faced the press yesterday with Ireland assistant Mark Tainton and fodder was thrown to the assembled hacks and was well and good, as readers of the Times and Examiner will have learned. Born leader. Check. Face of a new generation. Check. Ready for war on Saturday. Check.
Yet the Indo interestingly diverted from the script. Rather than have the journalist in question lauding the inevitability of O'Mahony's greatness, most of the celebrating was done by Munster and Ireland legend David Wallace.
"Peter is a hugely physical and confrontational player. He never takes a step back and is, for want of a better description, an enforcer. He was very impressive in that role last season but he has evolved his game and is even more impressive this season," Wallace said.
"Where he has improved is in adding a lot of finesse to his game. We know he wants to go through people if possible – and he actually has the strength to do so as we saw against South Africa – but he can now go around them too.
"He has added that string to his bow and will, I believe, develop into a top-class blindside flanker."
While it would be hard to find fault with any of Wallace's statements, nothing he's said here is exactly what you might call newsworthy. 'Ex-player expresses opinion about current player' rarely works as news without some PR event to hang it on, and based on the information put forward in the story by Indo rugby newbie Conor George, it's hard to find any. We accept Wallace's greatness for Ireland and Munster but his thoughts on Saturday's match are no more valid than say David Humphries's (presumed) opinions on why Paddy Jackson should be on the bench over Ronan O'Gara on Saturday. And I don't think we'll be seeing that article appear in any broadsheets south of the border any time soon.
And then you do a bit of googling and see that David Wallace is represented by Frankie Sheahan's Front Row Media, the same people who represent Peter O'Mahony. And then you think of Iain Henderson's sudden arrival on the international scene this autumn.
And you wonder.
