Pool Five/Munster v Wasps: Keith Dugganon how the leaving of his beloved Munster turned out to be the making of the Wasps scrumhalf

In a breakfast cafe near Ealing Common tube stop, a lone poster advertising Wasps rugby club hangs on the wall, but apart from that there is precious little evidence that one of the jewels of English rugby glitters in this forgettable suburb. The Wasps' training ground is a 10-minute stroll from the high street and there the pitches are laid out with tyres and cones for the morning session and every so often the thunder of planes from Heathrow breaks the morning quiet.

In the weights room, Lawrence Dallaglio prowls around near the door, and you can't help thinking the slightly retro choice of music belongs to the captain: it must be years since anyone has heard Liam Gallagher belting out Cigarettes and Alcohol. That old soundtrack from the Cool Britannia era, the row of club crests lining the wall of the club's bar, the grey morning and the greasy spoons with welcoming lights and all-day breakfasts all reinforce the fact that this is London, England. And it has become a happy work place for Eoin Reddan.

"There is a real club feel about this place," the Limerickman explains as he pulls up a stool and chats easily.

"Like, I had seen what it was like on the day when Munster played their Heineken Cup final. This year, on the day of our final, I woke up at home in Richmond and walked 500 yards to get picked up down the road. I had my bag on my shoulder and I was wearing my Wasps track-suit and traffic flew by me. Nobody batted an eyelid.

"Joe Worsley picked me up and I could see Joe was a bit hyped up because he nearly ran about four people over on the way here. And he is normally so placid. But the normality of the place was bizarre. It was life as usual. That really helped me to concentrate on that game.

"Then we headed four miles down the road and there were 80,000 people in Twickenham and it was just brilliant."

It is hard to fully appreciate how far and how fast Reddan has travelled since leaving Munster at the invitation of Warren Gatland in 2005. His boyhood dream of running the Munster pack had become mired in month after month of frustration as he found himself defined by his place on the bench, unable to make a sustained argument against the unique mix of bravery and sang-froid with which Peter Stringer played the position. The perception of Stringer and Ronan O'Gara as a kind of unbreakable combination had already become national.

He joined a Wasps club with a rich lineage of scrumhalves. Matt Dawson was on the last lap of a sometimes brilliant and frequently mouthy, colourful career. Before that, the laconic Welsh maestro Rob Howley was the resident number nine. It was surely Reddan's place to either do or die as a professional rugby player.

And almost from the beginning the Wasps management gave the Irishman the minutes and the faith to prove he could walk in these shining footsteps. When he won his first title with Wasps - the Powergen Anglo Welsh Cup - he felt nothing so much as relief.

"That was based on the fact that I hadn't let people down and I had helped maintain a standard. And to be fair, that was always a message that came across in Munster too. You were always made aware of who carried the jersey before you."

REDDAN IS ADMIRABLY candid about the fact his intention upon signing for Munster was to try and oust Stringer. He had attracted the stellar province after forging an eye-catching halfback partnership with the Connacht and Ireland veteran Eric Elwood. The one trace of nostalgia in Reddan's voice emanates from his memories of Galway, when he walked into the Sportsground and found himself flinging passes to Elwood, whom he had watched on television wearing the green shirt of Ireland in the waning days of amateurism.

"That experience was incredible," he says now. "Eric was such a huge influence on me and I doubt he even knows it. Straight away he taught me what an international outhalf expects. The ball on a plate; no f***ing around. And you could hear Eric from 70 yards away. I loved that. To this day, I enjoy playing with outhalves who have that aggression.

"It's good to have that bit of confrontation between nine and 10 because you don't have time to be messing around. Rog is good like that too; he's fairly aggressive in what he wants. It was the same here with Alex King. And that goes back to Eric. Just to watch him reading a game and his incredible loyalty to Connacht was a highlight."

But the Munster lure was seductive. Reddan admits now he was "bullish" about moving; at the very least, he believed he would be able to challenge for a starting place. It was not about having thoughts above his station; just the honest admission of a young professional in what is, ultimately, a business.

"Isn't that what the prize is?" he muses now. "To displace someone that good? That is what the goal is surely? You only have 10 years at this and you want to be winning things and to pit yourself against the best. It didn't work out for me and I was disappointed with that. And you do get forgotten about - even by the coaches. It still irks me that I didn't play as well then as I should have. It's all very well blaming Munster. But I didn't play then as I did now."

Perhaps he is being charitable to his old club. But Reddan left with no animosity. He happened to be in Galway on the day his old team-mates won the European Cup on that thrilling day in 2006, and that night he headed almost on instinct down to Limerick to celebrate with them in the Clarion Hotel.

By then he felt at home in London. Johnny O'Connor had all but organised a welcoming committee when he arrived, and with Jeremy Staunton and Peter Bracken knocking around, there were plenty of familiar accents.

He was living in Richmond, a gorgeous Thames village close enough to the city. But it helped also that the senior men like Dawson and Dallaglio treated him with a combination of respect and encouragement. It wasn't long before he regained the self-confidence that had slowly drained away to the point where he somehow felt he had become invisible at Munster.

When he looks back at the inertia of those months, it is with absolutely no bitterness, and with remarkable perspicacity for a 27-year-old, he was able to understand the process even though he felt trapped by it.

He continued to train hard and forced himself to be optimistic when the first team was read out. But on Saturdays he found himself all but locked out. It was the old dilemma: he couldn't play without proving himself and couldn't prove himself if he was not playing. It was deeply frustrating but he felt he had no choice but to tough it out. Complaining to the coach was not his style.

"I am sceptical of that because coaches pick teams on hunches sometimes. And they are entitled to. All you can do is put yourself in the position that he might have a hunch about you. If you go up to a coach and demand the reasons you are not playing, he mightn't always have them. So he has to come up with them. And then they become reasons and he puts you in boxes."

Asked what might have happened had Wasps not rescued him, Reddan speculates that he might have returned to accountancy. It is a frighteningly narrow line between those who flourish in professional rugby and those who drift away.

The images of Reddan dashing for that famous try in the European Cup victory against Leicester last spring make it easy to forget he might just as easily have been balancing ledgers by then.

The style and assurance of Wasps' march through Europe, and the excitement, pressure and rewards that came with it, mean that rugby has richly compensated Reddan for his perseverance and self-belief. But that long apprenticeship at Munster has taught him there are no guarantees. And it helped him to apply the same combination of full-hearted training and professional detachment when it came to waiting and hoping to get a shout in the Ireland team.

HIS BREAKTHROUGH PROPER was, of course, highly trumpeted because of the starkness of the conditions, when he started against France and then Argentina during the crucial, doomed games of Ireland's nightmarish World Cup campaign. While Irish rugby underwent a few weeks of purging of the soul, Reddan trained with Wasps three days after the bruising Argentina defeat and played for the first team the next weekend. He has not looked back but grows animated in explaining that the collective disappointment of Ireland's World Cup crushed any sense of personal pride he took from starting.

"I saw an interview with Ronan after his first game back and he was saying how bad everyone felt about it all. Guys don't say that lightly. We all felt that. Look, I'm Irish. If I hadn't been picked on the squad and went as a fan and we lost I would have been gutted. So having had something to do with it, I felt worse.

"The conflicting emotion came before the match. I was delighted to be picked. But afterwards, well, it was the same as looking back on Wasps' record. Ireland had come close to winning the Grand Slam and I wanted to come into the team and help to add to that kind of form. But we didn't perform and that was terribly disappointing."

Nonetheless, Reddan has forced himself into the reckoning now when it comes to the Ireland shirt. He returns to Limerick this afternoon as the senior man in a halfback partnership that impresses; Danny Cipriani is the form number 10 in England right now.

It would be easy for Reddan to talk about the importance of Thomond Park in his life: that unglamorous hunk of concrete - a flaming building site right now - is a state of mind as much as a sports stadium.

But he has worked too hard and waited too long to become dewy- eyed about this particular homecoming. The sight of the two pack generals, Reddan and Stringer, operating on the same pitch gives this mammoth European Cup game an intriguing subplot and is bound to fuel further debate as to who should start at number nine in Ireland's spring campaign. For Reddan - and, no doubt, for Stringer too - that stuff is just noise. To begin with, scrumhalves don't really see much of one another in the modern game. And frustrated as Reddan might have been during his Munster spell, he always got along fine with the Corkman.

If Reddan got one lucky break, it is that Matt Dawson, in reaching the natural end of his sporting life, was generous enough to try to pass on everything he knew to his young Irish protege. That could not have happened at Munster. And right now Reddan could not afford to be as generous to any understudy that may arrive at Wasps.

"I wouldn't be helping a guy get on in front of me. Of course not," he smiles. "Matt was at the point where he was not as fast or as strong as he used to be and I suppose they were my attributes. But I learned what a scrumhalf could do by thinking. He could still play a great game of rugby. And I went here with my eyes and ears wide open and he proved to be a great guy. I learned so much.

"Today is different. This is business. We have to win the game. Munster have to win the game. We all know we need to be right.

"Peter and I won't see much of each other. There is so much at stake. And this just has to be another game for me. That is how I see it."

But he will be where he always vowed he would, out there calling the shots in Thomond. If wearing the black and yellow of Wasps has been the price, then Reddan will pay it happily for it has been an honour too.

Part of the place will always hold an allure for him. But like Thomas Wolfe once wrote, you can't go home again. And there is no sentimentality in Eoin Reddan's voice when he says, "Leaving Munster was the easiest decision I ever had to make."