Interview with Eddie O'Sullivan: Johnny Watterson finds the Ireland head coach largely undaunted by critics and happy to let his winning margins speak for him.

A Triple Crown fades, a tour to New Zealand looms. The coach's life lurches through the year and here on a humid in Dublin, Eddie O'Sullivan flexes his body into the chair. Shirt, tie, jacket. You may never see him in denim flares and a mango polo neck. He is carrying a large, raspberry-coloured briefcase and relates its provenance. A bargain, believe it, and a wonderful hue, a ripple shot through a block of vanilla cream.

Seven hundred - or is it 7,000? - businessmen have just been listening to the Irish coach talk about becoming prosperous and effective in the market, how to arm and tool-up for a world where if you're not plated with kevlar you become road-kill.

They patrol the Burlington foyer, these disciples. Not quite the athletic specimens the guru is used to. But the methods and techniques he brings to rugby coaching bridge the narrow straits between winning matches and working the exacting ground of finance and profit margins. To O'Sullivan rugby is business and business is rugby. And today the goal-setting, middle-aged men are milling around the bull-pen of a foyer, ears cocked to his high-octane wisdom.

The coach understands cutthroat and when he's in the ring he plays a smart game. He's streetwise and hotwired to the theories about how he can make Ireland a better team, to the expert opinions and allegations of his frittering away of the greatest talent Ireland have had for decades.

After six years with the national team, he has drawn on the public floggings and made them work for him. On occasion it has stung, and while he's not quite the lead-chewing, bulletproof personality who implacably faces the cameras after a 45-7 assault by New Zealand or a charged 28-24 Triple Crown win over England, he remains sure of the direction he's taking.

His Ireland front row has been called "crap" by big personalities with modest coaching CVs. He has been damned as a bad analyst, a control freak, a fixer, and perhaps most damning of all, a politician. It has been said he lost the dressing-room at half-time in Paris this year, that he threw the head with Ronan O'Gara in training, that he has cramped a mercurial back line. And yet from that miasma of judgement, he has emerged as Ireland's most successful coach.

O'Sullivan has stacked up the numbers in his favour and has the luxury of now being in a comfortable place and, as he would see it, pretty well protected from agendas.

He has been in charge for 54 tests and won more than half. In the Six Nations he has won more than 70 per cent of games and earned two Triple Crowns. In five seasons Ireland have won four games three times and three games twice. In the context of what went before, the former schoolteacher gets a gold star.

"I remember at the start when I took over and I was asked what was my goal . . . I said the main thing I want to do is make Ireland a team that performs consistently. It is important because from a business point of view the Irish rugby team have to generate a lot of income for the IRFU, which runs the game, and if we're inconsistent it's not attractive for sponsors.

"I think by and large over the last few years we've been pretty consistent, and that's going through a transition period. The team that played England had eight changes to the team that played Wales. We've had the odd day where it's gone pear shaped.

"But some people will never be happy out there. Now I'm happy to be involved in a successful team but I don't think it's all my doing. We still try to consistently perform against the best teams in the world like England, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and France. And the reason those teams are successful is quite simple: they have loads of money and they have loads of players. We don't have loads of money and we don't have loads of players.

"We've got the players with their four weeks' holidays, their 10-week pre-season where possible, and we keep their games down to 25, 30 a year. All of that comes in. It's not all about coaching on the pitch. It's the structures around the team.

"But I'll let other people judge whether I've overachieved or failed. I think it's not wrong for me to say that at the moment we are doing an okay job. It's going places - although I know the players aren't totally happy. Paul O'Connell spoke very well after the Triple Crown match, when he said it's great to come to Twickenham and win a Triple Crown but you know there is more in this team and we have to kick on from here.

"Paris was a disappointment and ironically, the critics of me, the people who would say I'm underachieving as a coach, are those who said in Paris that I'd lost the team and should have been fired. If I'd lost the team at 40 points down, they'd have packed their tent and gone home. The fact they came back I think was an indicator that they hadn't given up on me and I hadn't given up on them. Moving on to win the Triple Crown was proof of that."

Soon Ireland will take another tilt at the best team in the world. That they haven't beaten New Zealand won't colour the effort in Hamilton or Auckland - or in Perth, Australia. But punching above their weight is the way O'Sullivan sees the Irish team improving despite obvious frailties.

Triple Crown or not, barstool experts point to four outside centres playing across the back line, glaring vacancies for understudies to O'Gara and Peter Stringer and a glaring lack of depth at prop.

"It's an old fashioned view of the game that we should pick a winger on the left just because he's a winger with his club. That we can interchange is better for us. The fact that Shane Horgan can play 12 and 14, Brian O'Driscoll can play 12 and 13, Gordon D'Arcy can play 12, 13 and 15, Geordan Murphy can play 15 and wing and Andrew Trimble can play wing and outside centre adds more strings. If some play out of position then so be it. I got a hammering in the autumn because Denis Leamy was played at number eight; then he was voted the best number eight in the Six Nations.

"I sometimes think that if other countries think outside the box it's innovative but if Ireland do it it's stupid. That's part of our DNA.

"But the problems for us are well known. Our front row is thin. The mistake people make is that they think I can do something about that. I can't really. My job is to coach the national team, not to develop the players for Ireland.

"David Humphreys's retirement I do see as a serious problem. I was hoping he would stay on but I understood why he left.

"But he did say to me when he was stepping down, 'Look, if you are stuck at any point I would consider the possibility of coming back. I'm playing for Ulster and if you think I'm playing well enough and you need me, I'd be happy to help out.'

"It could happen. I'm not ruling it out. Let's see what happens.

"There are number 10s out there and people will rattle off four or five names but the key thing is can they operate at Test level. . . If you put a player in at outhalf who is not able to cope with the pressure . . . it's a fulcrum position."

Ireland's next six games are New Zealand twice, Australia, South Africa, Australia, Pacific Islands. The team could lose all of them before next year's Six Nations Championship and World Cup. Given the ferocity of the criticism last autumn, even now O'Sullivan can see the spear tips glimmering in the long grass. But four years in the job and he's been toughened. The coach can deflect the blows but the protective instinct is triggered when the flak becomes personal, as it did after the mauling by New Zealand.

"This year more than any other I saw a different person in the media," he says. "I was reading about a guy that I hardly knew and a lot of it was negative and nasty. Then you begin to doubt yourself. I was getting criticism that I hadn't been getting for three and a half years, a pretty hard rap, personal stuff. It worried me for my kids (Katie, 13, and Barry,16). People would see me as their father and perceive me to be that type of person. It upset them a bit as well. They are at a pretty impressionable age and they do read the papers and they are aware of what's being said. My worry was that it was impacting on them."

He watches Barry play Gaelic football and rugby. Normally he'll arrive after the start and leave before the end of the game. For obvious reasons he keeps a distance. He knows that, like the players, he moves in an unstable environment. But when next Wednesday he announces his 30-man squad for the summer tour and pulls on a tracksuit, he's in the zone he likes and with a good team book-ended by the towering Paul O'Connell and O'Driscoll, two players "we cannot do without against the big guns".

The last words he had with them collectively were unscripted, and uttered after the Triple Crown win.

"I said to them we deserved to win the Triple Crown, that we played well enough to win it and that we showed huge intestinal fortitude, guts, to win the game the way we did. I said we learned lessons, lessons from Paris, and that we had travelled a hard road and were in a place that we deserved to be."

O'Sullivan says he could have the best coaching record in the world against weaker teams but you've got to go out there and take the hard knocks to get strong. He says the summer tour is kind of experimental, the World Cup a snapshot every four years and the Six Nations Ireland's cash cow.

He leaps up and hoists the bag from the floor, tie and jacket flapping. There are matters to be organised and a team to be built. Just the man for the job.