The Ireland centre admits Australia tour was a ‘bittersweet experience’ while taking pride in being part of Lions folklore For Brian O’Driscoll this Lions tour was, he admits, “a bittersweet experience”. Two days after the team won the series, O’Driscoll said he was still “living it raw” as he tried to come to terms with Warren Gatland’s decision to drop him from the deciding Test. “I haven’t really gone and analysed it all and thought about how painful this has been,” O’Driscoll said
The Ireland centre admits Australia tour was a ‘bittersweet experience’ while taking pride in being part of Lions folklore
For Brian O’Driscoll this Lions tour was, he admits, “a bittersweet experience”. Two days after the team won the series, O’Driscoll said he was still “living it raw” as he tried to come to terms with Warren Gatland’s decision to drop him from the deciding Test. “I haven’t really gone and analysed it all and thought about how painful this has been,” O’Driscoll said. “I’ll probably think about it a little bit more over the next few weeks when I have a bit of time on my hands.”
There was some consolation to be had, O’Driscoll said, in that “I have been on four tours and thankfully I have managed to win one. Finally.” But that was not nearly enough to obscure the disappointment he felt at Gatland’s decision. “Not having involvement on the final day does taint it a little bit for me,” O’Driscoll said. “But it is still a series win. I played 80 minutes in the first two Tests and I did have a big say in what happened as well.”
It is the mark of the man that O’Driscoll was able put it his feelings in a broader perspective. “It wasn’t exactly as I would have liked it scripted but you don’t write your own scripts. Otherwise you’d be scoring hat-tricks every week,” he said. “The main thing is we won the tour. One man’s disappointment counts for nothing when there is a squad full of guys who are very, very happy to have won themselves a Lions series.” This squad, he said, “will always be remembered in Lions folklore, for evermore, as one of the tours that matches 1997, and 1989, and 1974. ’13 is now a number that will be remembered.”
It was the first time in his professional career that O’Driscoll had been dropped, which goes to show that even a player who has been on four Lions tours has not experienced everything. When Gatland broke the news to him last Wednesday the two didn’t really discuss the decision. “You just want to be able to deal with it yourself, and rationales and reasons don’t really make sense in your head when you hear that.”
Six hours later that day, O’Driscoll was out at a community rugby session at Noosa Dolphins rugby club. There, the tour manager Andy Irvine said, he had stayed an extra half hour after the other players had gone so that he could sign autographs for the kids. He was doing something similar again on Monday afternoon, when the tour sponsors HSBC were handing over the Lions kit and training equipment to a local school. O’Driscoll had made an effort, he said, to “make sure that I reacted in the best possible manner to help the team out as much as I could this week, albeit it wasn’t going to be on the park on game day.”
O’Driscoll said he could understand the end justified the means, simply because “more than any other Lions tour it was about getting that series win”. He just did not agree with Gatland’s thinking. He knew there was a possibility he might be dropped once Manu Tuilagi and Jamie Roberts were fit. It was still a shock. “You always back yourself and you are hopeful that you are going to be selected. You have got to think that you are better than your opposite number and that is why you need to be selected every week. That’s the mentality you need to have.”
The anger the decision provoked in Ireland did get through to O’Driscoll, through Twitter, texts, and talks with “a few guys at home”.
Gatland has spoken about how hurt he was by the reaction but for O’Driscoll “that made it a little bit easier because I wasn’t the only one that felt I should have been in the team”. A place on the bench, he said, would not have been much better, and he was honest enough to admit that Tuilagi was a better pick as a replacement because he offered cover on the wing as well as in the centre. But it still would have been better than sitting in the stands, which, he said, he did not enjoy at all. “It is a lot easier being out on the pitch.”
O’Driscoll has one last season to play. “It is going to be my last year so I will try to go out on a high,” he said. This Lions tour means that he “can definitely go into next season with an element of relief, knowing that goal I have been chasing for a lot of years has finally been achieved”.
It may just give him a little extra motivation too, when Wales play Ireland in the Six Nations next spring. The man clearly has a point to prove.
Brian O’Driscoll is an HSBC ambassador. HSBC is proud principal partner to the 2013 British & Irish Lions Tour to Australia. For more information www.youtube.com/LionsHSBC
