When players gaze over their shoulders after this World Cup is completed, they will look back on a competition that was laced with large snakes ready to gulp them down and well-placed ladders offering to lift them back up. For many it has been a roll of the dice.

On the pitch as well as off it, France will live in players' minds for the emotional blizzards that raged around the corridors of the Sofitel Hotel in Bordeaux and Paris, the exasperating letdowns and the giddy hopes of being reselected when things looked as though they could get no worse.

This team will return to Ireland emotionally bruised and battered, maybe stronger for the harsh lessons picked up along the way and certainly more streetwise to the vagaries of a World Cup that refused to yield to even moderate Irish demands.

Most players have a story that will define the competition for them. From Ronan O'Gara to Peter Stringer, to Geordan Murphy to Girvan Dempsey and to Denis Hickie, all can claim to have at some point felt abused by the game they have always loved. The relationship with rugby over the last month has been more fractious and uneven than usual.

Hickie was selected to play twice, then dropped from the bench against France for Andrew Trimble. Having declared he would be retiring following the World Cup, the Leinster winger's international career looked as though it had been ended by a coach's decision, not the way he wanted. Then Trimble's hopes were crushed and Hickie has been recalled to play in what is likely his last game for Ireland.

"I was shattered last week, not unexpectedly," he says. "Obviously things have changed a lot in the last week. I am certainly looking forward to the game. It's a big challenge but that sits easy with me. It doesn't make me feel nervous or anything like that."

It would have been an ignominious way to close a career that yielded 29 tries in 61 international matches and after a 2003 World Cup that ended with a ruptured Achilles tendon, the competition was demonstrating a habit of biting him. In 2005 a dislocated fibula kept him on the sidelines for much of the following season. You could say Hickie has become used to emotional rides.

"It does bring added pressure because it could be my last game. But I got my head around that a long time before the tournament started, so I don't feel it a huge amount more," he says. "It mightn't be my last game either. The game against Georgia could have been my last game, so you have to take it as it comes. But I am aware that things are stacked up against us so it becomes more of a reality for me that, if we don't get what we need to get out of it, it's over for me."

Eddie O'Sullivan's decision to install Hickie on the left wing rested with what he called the dynamic of the backline. And that is where it was left. Few pushed O'Sullivan for a more extensive explanation, largely because after a career spanning 10 seasons there was agreement on the Leinster player rejoining the front line.

"I like to think I will bring what I always bring, the more tangible things like experience, having played a lot of big games like this over the course of my career," he says, squirming a little for fear of appearing a brag.

"The squad is quite balanced. The general skills and ability of the players are good. People will always have strengths and I would like to think from being around a bit it helps my decision-making and kicking and things like that. I'm confident in what I can do."

More complex and reflective than many of the professionals he plays with and against, Hickie's reputation reaches beyond Ireland. The decision to announce his retirement before the World Cup drew surprise but he has always been, in his own way, considered. In the logical side of his heart, he knows that this will be his last game.

"The pressure will come on at certain points in the game to score tries. Whenever that point comes, you can start panicking and let your head drop or get on with it. We have to expect that point will come but we will have to stick to our guns and stick to our plan and keep playing and not go into our shell," he says. "You have to anticipate that will happen because that happens in every game, not just this one."

The final twist could be the least expected. Ireland to win with four tries? No, this unsentimental World Cup would never be so crazy.