SIX NATIONS:While enjoying his rugby more than ever, Marcus Horan has had enough of the critics

THE CREAKS in the joints, the "water" and the flight patterns of certain birds all tell us that Brian Ashton is actually feeling more pressure bearing down on him than Eddie O'Sullivan. In the run in to the closing match of the Six Nations Championship, divining who is more combustible has been left to homespun methods.

The former teachers are once again enriching their lives in the banner-headline school of hard knocks and as Ireland seek to rise to the Twickenham challenge next Saturday they will do so in the knowledge that defeat would register a Six Nations nadir under O'Sullivan. Not since 1999 will the team have finished swinging so low with three championship defeats in one season. That, in academic terms, would not get you into third level.

While the players say they are immune to the venom that has oozed out over the last few matches and especially over the weekend, the cries for O'Sullivan to be impaled on some of his own aphorisms has filtered through to the thinking on the pitch.

Though the coach has proven eminently capable of defending himself, Marcus Horan's sense that criticism has become abuse does not sit easily with his comprehension of team fraternity. Horan is not known as a whinger but, sitting in the foyer of the team hotel in Dublin, the Ireland prop is bristling.

In the year since he has become a father, Horan has also found time to lift his nose out of the mud and enjoy his rugby just as the team has been forced to accept criticism. Stock answers from players are that they don't read or heed the media. But for Horan, the vitriol is cutting deep.

"Of course it impacts. It's hard," he says. "We are a group of people that work together and we've built up relationships with each other. It is hard, especially hard when . . . it's a very Irish thing. We are a small nation and then you find people are turning against Irish coaches and Irish players and nearly taking pleasure out of the fact that we've lost . . . I think that is pathetic. I think it's pretty sad. I find it hard. I find it a hard place to be.

"I've really enjoyed the Six Nations. For the first time in a long time I can say that. The irony of it is that we are probably not going as well as we have before. I've a new-born baby at home and I was relishing coming up here to train, which is kind of weird. You expect you'd enjoy being back home but I love the training. The coaching is brilliant. That's saying something. I've a family back home and it hard being away but I've really enjoyed it. And I find it hard to see things written in the paper about coaches and written about players when guys are here bursting their b**** trying to do things and do it right."

This is a different Horan to the one that fetched Ronan O'Gara's cross-field kick a fortnight ago to score a try against Scotland. A week in Irish rugby is longer than a week in politics and the last six months, aside from a brief period against Scotland, when the team expressed a capability we had not see since a year ago, have been a sequence of low points.

But will the red rose and the white jersey stir an Ireland team, lacking its two first-choice centres, and push them towards coalescing around those in the camp taking the heavy flak? And whose misery at this point is greatest, the World Cup finalists or that of O'Sullivan?

"I think it's more of an Irish jersey that motivates you. I think anyone who puts on an Irish jersey should be motivated no matter who you play, whether it's Romania, or England or New Zealand," adds Horan warming to the task of laying down first principles. "That's motivation enough for me. I hate to see fellas outside the squad devalue the jersey by comments made and I think we as players have to keep value in the jersey and I'd hope we've been doing that.

"You're asking whether it would have been fair if we'd won it (against Wales) on that performance. I say if we were still in with a shout of a Triple Crown I'd be delighted even if we didn't play well. But it didn't happen and we've got one game left to put things right."

Having spread the entrails, thrown straws in the wind and absorbed the commentary of the chattering classes, one game between two sides struggling to avoid a scornful end to the championship may possibly be, despite Horan's stand, too late.