Rugby World Cup: On the eve of his last ever Rugby World Cup, Ireland captain Brian O'Driscoll is, by turns, remorseful, confident, ebullient and, ultimately, cautiously optimistic, writes Gerry Thornley.

On the eve of his fourth and last World Cup, Ireland’s greatest player of all time could hardly be more relaxed. Married life with Amy, aka “the missus”, appears to be good. Despite the demands of being filmed by Sky Sports News for two days, he chats happily for almost an hour, opting for the quiet but plush drawing room behind the reception area in Carton House.

He enjoys the squad’s new base and the comfort of single rooms to themselves. O’Driscoll seems as comfortable in his own skin as he ever has been. Except for one thing. Ireland don’t really do World Cups – or at any rate, haven’t until now.

For O’Driscoll, that rankles, especially the last one four years ago. The only time his voice drops is when he reflects on his previous three World Cups and the idea that this will be his last one. Gone is the general talk of four years ago, when Irish players declared in advance that they wanted to boldly go where no Irish team had gone before – beyond the quarter-finals – to be replaced by the mantra of taking it one game at a time. This somehow suits the Irish psyche better (witness the Grand Slam of 2009).

But damn it. “Yeah, I want to mark it, I want to mark it,” he admits. “I know it’s my last one and it would be a disappointment to look back at a career at the biggest stage, essentially being a failure both as a collective and as an individual. You haven’t created any memories from any of the World Cups and I just want to be able to do that.

“You’re not owed anything, but I look at this team and I look at the guys around me – I know their potential and I want them to achieve that potential. If achieving your potential means you go out in the group stages or you go out in the quarter-final . . . good luck to those teams because they’ve really had to put it up to us.”

He thinks about it some more. “I think if we achieve our potential, or somewhere close to it . . . we can do something. And I just don’t want another year of looking back going, ‘we flatter to deceive’.”

One quarter-final in three attempts, and “a hefty beating” in that quarter-final as well. And, he reflects, it wasn’t as if they didn’t have form; reaching a Grand Slam shoot-out with England, the eventual winners in 2003 and travelling in 2007 with a Triple Crown and having come within one narrow home defeat to France of a Slam. The World Cups neatly pockmark his career too. In 1999, he was 20 and relatively carefree; he admits he actually doesn’t even remember too much about the infamous 28-24 defeat to Argentina in that quarter-final play-off in Lens.

“I remember doing that 13-man lineout [to save the game late on] and going, you’ve faith in the coach, particularly as a young lad, ‘this definitely will work, sure the coach told us to do it. It has to work!’

“I also remember thinking at the same time, ‘We’ll still get out of this; I might be able to pull [something] out of this’ and then time just went and then all of a sudden we were gone . . . that’s it, off you go home. It was not the fondest of memories. But, again, when you’re young it’s different. If I was 32 then I think that would have been devastating. When you’re 20 years of age you’ve got your whole rugby career ahead of you.”

Fast-forward four years and wins over Romania and Namibia led to a rematch with Los Pumas. Ireland won 16-15, but you could reach out and bite the tension in the Adelaide Oval before Ronan O’Gara emerged from the bench to rescue the situation.

“That was frighteningly tense,” he agrees. “I remember being highly stressed in that game. ROG coming on and actually winning the game for us. He kicked some important goals and Quinny [Alan Quinlan, self-hailed saviour of Irish rugby] for his try.”

He also recalls a moment near the end when the brilliant Argentinian full-back Ignacio Corletto was given a run down the wing.

“I do remember thinking, I have got to tackle him or we’re out of the World Cup. He was a big unit too and trying to get some help to drag him into touch. Eventually the ball went dead and it wasn’t an elation moment, it was just, thanks be to God, we’re in a quarter-final and now we’ve a chance because we still have to play Australia.”

This time it was a one-point defeat in Melbourne, condemning Ireland to a quarterfinal against France rather than against Scotland, in a game he suggests Ireland could, if not necessarily should, have won.

He also recounts reading some sort of official synopsis of that World Cup and how it claimed one of the “worst moments” of that game was O’Driscoll landing a drop goal to make it a one point game instead of looking for a try. “I thought, nonsense. It got us to within a point. There’s always an outside chance then of a penalty. So I remember thinking that was ridiculous. I’ll find your name and never speak to you again,” he says, in mock indignation.

In the quarter-final, also in Melbourne, it appeared Ireland had one foot on the prebooked plane home before kick-off. Ireland were beaten by half-time, before three consolation tries as both benches were emptied eventually leading to a 43-21 exit.

“I’ll tell you what I would say, and I wouldn’t say this often because I thought Eddie did a fantastic job for us – I think our game plan was terrible,” says O’Driscoll. “We completely played into their hands. We practised it all week, thinking that this was going to work, but we were so narrow,” he says, emphasising the point with his two hands.

“It really was brutal and our defence was poor. We just let them in but we were so blunt in attack and then they made wholesale changes and we got a couple of scores at the end and made it look less horrific than it really was.”

A remarkable combination of attacker and defender, of match-winner with a warrior spirit, he nonetheless remains as grounded and selfdeprecating as ever. The secret probably lies in the way he has retained close bonds with many of his boyhood, non-rugby mates, although if that doesn’t do it then the likes of Shane Horgan and Denis Hickie and his long-standing Leinster mates can do. And then, failing that, there’s always Ronan O’Gara and co.

O’Driscoll recalls one of his two tries that day, off a David Humphreys chip, as one of his best ever finishes. “I had to get it down with my left hand before I went over the dead ball line.” He’s laughing at himself now. “I just remember thinking, that was a good finish – right only [another] 34 or 35 points and then we’re back in it!”

Four years on, it looked as if O’Driscoll’s tournament might be over before it began, courtesy of a haymaker by Mikaera Tewhata in the Battle of Bayonne, which left O’Driscoll with a fractured cheekbone just 24 days before the opening match. He feared so too.

“Every time I sniffed I could feel a sharp pain and I thought, that’s not good. The cheekbone was broken and because there was a scar, they couldn’t see if there was an indentation in it. When the scan came in, it was just one of the sinuses.”

He missed the hard-earned 23-20 warm-up win over Italy in Ravenhill, but the opening win over Namibia, when Ireland struggled to claim a bonus point until almost the 70th minute, was another warning that something was wrong.

“We realised, we’re not in a great place here. I think the S and C [strength and conditioning] guys got a bit hung up with us being smaller than a lot of other countries . . . we did five weeks without touching a ball. That seems, now, suicidal. You have to constantly keep your skills working.

“That was the great thing with Joe [Schmidt] last year when we did pre-season. From day one, a ball was out and a lot of our fitness last year was through games. So when you’re under-fit or fatigued, skills levels are still high. . . All the best teams, they’re the skilful teams.”

The Georgian game “was a shock in that we just had no confidence”. Though the French were one defeat from a harrowing exit on their own soil, they were comfortably the better of two off-colour sides. “They played okay, not brilliantly, but we played poorly. They defended well. I remember that.”

Cue an almost inevitable 30-15 defeat to Argentina. “The thing is, they scored first so we really needed to come out of the blocks in that game and it didn’t happen. It was a sorry sight.”

With that, an inglorious exit for a good team, mostly with 50 caps to their names, in their prime and with an estimated 60,000 Irish fans having travelled over to France.

“Yeah, it was the biggest disappointment of my career other than the injury on the Lions Tour. It stung more [than 1999 and 2003] because we underachieved and completely flattered to deceive. You could see it unraveling and you just couldn’t help the thing, but all this talk of all the in-fighting and everything . . . We did get a bit of light relief out of that.”

He shudders to think how social networking can exacerbate the rumour mill and recalls how he recently added to rumours that Rob Kearney won €42.5 million in the Euromillions draw.

“I retweeted it to 70,000 people. It was on [radio stations] Spin and Dublin’s 98. It made the BBC website! It was great, it ruined his day off! It just shows the power of things like Twitter.”

Though he’s not so sure, himself, O’Driscoll probably retained his form better than any Irish player on that World Cup, which may have added to his frustration as his form and confidence dipped and he heard or read of comments that he was a spent force.

After the November 2008 series, he sat down and thought about where his career was at. “I had a chat with Michael Cheika and set myself some actual goals and just turned things around. I kind of played my way into some decent form, we won a couple of things, got on a Lions Tour.”

On the day of this interview he has another reason to be cheerful. “I weighed the same as Darce [Gordon D’Arcy] today. He was heartbroken, I was absolutely over the moon! I’d say that’s been eight, nine years.” He weighed in at 93kg, compared to around 98kg at the last World Cup.

“I’ve a different life. I’ve a different body.” A turning point around then was a wedding, when he could only link the outside hook on one side of his trousers to the inside hook on the other. “And it was still a tight fit.”

Thereafter, he vowed to play at a top weight of 95kg. “It’s hard to carry an extra 5kg. . . for another 80 minutes. And my game is an elusive game. It’s not a bish-bash-bang game; when I feel fitter, there are more moments in the last 10 minutes when everyone else is tired.”

A self-confessed chocoholic, he admits a whole bar of Toblerone wasn’t beyond his remit. But he gave up chocolate and all sweet things for Lent last year and was encouraged to stay off them.

“I got my fat test done at Leinster on a thing called the dexing machine, and I was the lowest in the Leinster squad. So I just let news filter out rather than . . . telling people! I had people coming up to me. Lukey [Fitzgerald] would have been gutted and when Shaggy [Shane Horgan] heard it, he was like, ‘that’s it, the dexing machine is broken’.” That’s what my close friends think of me: I’m a skinny fat person!”

His body fat ratio is down to 12 per cent. He enjoys going out for meals as much as ever, almost always opting for fish, but putting less on his plate and fewer nights out on the beer (“I had a very bendy arm”). In all of this his marriage helps. “It totally helps – having an understanding wife, too . . . she’s not trying to tempt me. She understands that as my profession I can’t do that.”

All in all, this has been his happiest four-year cycle, containing two Heineken Cups with Leinster and leading Ireland to the Holy Grail of a Grand Slam. There are a core of players facing into their last World Cup and their captain senses that “there is a realisation to let’s not allow what has happened before to continue. Let’s just try to enjoy this . . . God, the last World Cup was so miserable, whereas I did really enjoy the 2003 World Cup.”

They also have some notches on their collective belts this time, the Munster and Leinster boys each having supplemented two Heineken Cups with a Grand Slam. O’Driscoll also believes there’s less reliance on the first XV or 22. They’re better prepared, they have a good coaching team. It’s all in place.

“It’s over to us really. You can’t be pointing fingers at people. There are no excuses. Let’s just go down and let’s do it, the best job we can, and do something that we can be proud of.”