On a day in which Ireland needed big moments, Doris looked for the ball and his teammates looked for Doris.
Gavan Casey FEW CONSENSUSES CAN be formed in the immediate aftermath of a game as wild as Ireland’s seven-point defeat to the Springboks.
The Leinster back row was decidedly Ireland’s best player in Pretoria, leading from the front long before taking the reins as captain from Peter O’Mahony early in the second half. Had this been a game of Red Rover, the Ballina native would have been the only man left standing on the Irish side when the dust settled. This was Doris back to his ballistic best as a ball-carrier, less ‘footwork into contact’ and more ‘I hope you have an emergency contact.’
And while this was hardly a coming-of-age display for a player who has been capable of similar since he first represented his country four years ago, it felt seminal for the extent to which Ireland became reliant on Doris to take the wheel as the bus threatened to careen off a cliff’s edge. It won’t be long before his online critics begin to compare Ireland captain O’Mahony to Joe Biden, particularly after watching him get bounced — pretty much twice in the same carry — by his former Munster teammate Damian de Allende. What they’ll neglect to mention is that Ireland had to shorten their lineout, and it still went to absolute pot, without both O’Mahony and Dan Sheehan in the second half.
If O’Mahony wasn’t in athletic decline, there’d be something seriously wrong: he’s almost 35 years of age and for nearly 30 of those years, he has used his body with such recklessness that his fossil remains will one day bewilder palaeontologists. That he has required only two shoulder reconstruction surgeries should be listed in the ‘Honours’ section of his Wikipedia page when he does eventually hang his boots up.
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