Another Off The Ball roadshow, another cracking Irish rugby story.
The two seem to go hand-in-hand these days, as when current or former Ireland players get up on stage they always seem to give those listening a wonderful tale of something that previously had been kept between the players.
[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/252202927" params="auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%" height="450" iframe="true" /]
Last time it was Brian O'Driscoll sticking up for Ronan O'Gara and bating the shite out of Austin Healy, and in a similar theme Wednesday's night's Off The Ball roadshow gave us a story of Brian O'Driscoll once again looking after a teammate.
O'Brien himself told of how he got a fierce raking from Eric Miller, a senior player at the time, for being at every breakdown on his first training session, and BOD was not impressed.
It was one of my first senior training sessions, and obviously being young and probably overly keen the first day I was trying to make an impression, and some of the senior lads didn't take kindly to me being involved in every breakdown but it was Eric Miller that came in and gave me an awful shoe-ing on the back.
I just looked around and Brian had him, I think he'd thrown a dig at him, but if not he was definitely choking him! It was a nice feeling to have knowing that probably the best player we had at the time and our captain was sticking up for a young lad he didn't know much about.
That is the type of stuff you want to see from a captain, and is yet another example of Brian O'Driscoll being an incredible leader.
Brian was then asked what he remembered of the incident, to which he said:
Sometimes those sort of things happen at training sessions, and young lads are almost sent out like lambs to the slaughter where they will be told it's 3/4 level, where there's contact at rucks but not really, and one guy is told secretly by the coach to go in and muddy their ball and no-one else knows.
So they're at 100%, and everyone else is at 75%, so I remember Sean going in and doing that, and I was on Eric's team - I think with new guys you've got to encourage them along and make sure that they don't get disgruntled and feel out of place and kind of fearful of getting stuck in - so I do remember Eric being out of line, Seanie hadn't done anything wrong and it was a kind of gratuitous stamping, so I just thought it prudent that I have a word with Eric.
Fantastic.
These are the types of moments we're usually not privy too as outsiders to the Irish team, so it's great to hear them in a more relaxed environment where the players can give a good account of what went on.
You can listen back to the roadshow in full over on Newstalk.ie
