Irish prop Cian Healy attended a recent social event, where he met former captain Brian O’Driscoll. The two Clontarf lads played together with Ireland and also at Leinster for seven or eight years. But, according to Healy, the subject didn’t come up. The milestone he could reach on Friday didn’t arise. They remained schtum.
“I was at a friend’s wedding with him only a few weeks back,” says Healy. “But I didn’t bring it up.”
Two team-mates not talking about record numbers of caps makes some sense. The situation and maybe even a lack of self-indulgence on their part kept the issue of the prop drawing level with the centre’s international record a non-subject for wedding banter.
Either way, Healy will equal O’Driscoll’s number of 133 Irish caps if he comes off the bench against Argentina on Friday. Modesty becomes Healy. Humility, lack of fuss and, after years of a team-first attitude, discomfort surround discussing a personal mark that could endure for many years.
“Like 100th-cap week was probably the worst week of my career for how I felt,” says Healy. “But there were loads of nice things said and done. I don’t know if I have, over time, built myself so much into ‘group’ and hating ‘personal’. I don’t know what it is. It’s where my mindset goes with it.
“I would try to separate from this as much as possible. I kind of find any of the personal stuff adds more stress to my week than any of the group stuff.”
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He also has his own view of his former captain, who in his prime years was considered the best in the world at 13. A remarkable aspect of O’Driscoll’s 133 Irish caps is all his starts came in the same position and only one appearance came off the bench. In his final match in March 2014 against France, he played a full 80 minutes.
“Like, it’s very different between Drico [O’Driscoll] and me,” he says. “I wasn’t ever and will never be the player that he was, so it is separated in that immediately. I take pride in the durability and being able to show up. That’s something I do hold myself to a bit. Training sessions and enjoying the hard work of week in and week out, year in and year out. I have enjoyed that.”
Durability was also one of O’Driscoll’s traits. From a swashbuckling, try-scoring outside centre, he aged, applied wisdom and changed the way he played the position. From a cutting-edge back he evolved and adjusted into playing a more defensive role in the outside channels, a job Garry Ringrose does very well in the current set-up.
But props have different trajectories, and Healy has also changed. He now backs up Andrew Porter. Pitch time for the 37-year-old is limited to minutes in the last quarter of matches. Even that commitment has become a continual work in progress, an ongoing project to keep his body responsive and able.
“Just my mobility and looking after myself,” he says. “If there is anything bugging me, I don’t sit on it. I have a proactive approach to it. All of that then works into a routine for me which winds me down for the evening, to get to sleep. There’s a whole combination of flexibility and working on my body, wind down and stuff.
“It makes you feel good. I don’t like walking around sore or having a stiff back or sore legs. You do that at night, so you wake up feeling good. That directly knocks on to where my rugby is, so a positive on a positive.”
He has soared past Johnny Sexton, Ronan O’Gara, Paul O’Connell, Rory Best and Conor Murray, who is also still playing and came on at the end last Friday night to win cap 119. And Peter O’Mahony is there too among the centurions, with 108 caps.
Healy will keep offering himself to Irish coach Andy Farrell as a frontrow who can play across three positions until someone else shows they can bring more to the team. By then he may have exceeded the 133-cap ceiling.
“I do love it. I am in a place where I can’t picture myself anywhere else,” he says. “That’s a nice place to be because you can go through the years debating whether you should have done X, Y or Z. I can look at all of mine and say I was exactly where I wanted to be.”
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