Pool Five/Munster v Wasps: Gerry Thornleyon how the refreshed Munster number nine is up for the challenge

This should be interesting. In the greater scheme of things it may only be a side issue, but the prospect of Eoin Reddan returning to his home province to go head-to-head with Peter Stringer is an intriguing little sub-plot to the main storyline.

As tough as old boots, intensely professional, competitive and driven, with a pass that over the years has probably had no peers, Stringer has, thanks to his remarkable durability and consistency, seen off many a challenger, both at Munster - including Reddan himself - and Ireland in the last eight seasons.

He has missed only two Six Nations games since making his debut in that seismic 44-22 win over Scotland in 2000. But Reddan is undoubtedly the most complete and assured threat to the 29-year-old's pre-eminence on the eve of another Six Nations, and for the first time in his 79-Test career, Stringer finds himself up against the incumbent Ireland number nine.

Facing into his 74th Heineken European Cup match - only Anthony Foley and John Hayes have played more - Stringer finished Tuesday's double session and strolled up to the canteen in the University of Limerick with his bag draped over his right shoulder in readiness for his drive back to Cork, finding a quiet corner overlooking the UL bowl they've just practised on. This is a pressure week, but he knows how to handle it.

"I'm sure as the week goes on with time at home it will slip into my own head, and obviously that's a big motivation for me, without letting one-on-one duels sidetrack me from my game and my contribution to the team. It will be difficult, but in the context of the whole game it's quite meaningless and you've got to distance yourself from it."

Stringer has always veered towards the obsessive side of professionalism. Playing rugby matches has long since been the focal point of his life and still is. Now, after a largely frustrating 2007, he's back in the groove again.

"It's good to be playing and winning a few games, so I feel good, I feel fresh," he says, smiling, perhaps in self-deprecation at the enforced absences through injury and selection which meant that from the end of March until October 2007 he started just three matches.

There are many memories of Ireland's World Cup - few of them pleasant ones - but one of the abiding images is of a slightly haunted-looking Stringer obliged to watch the crunch French and Argentinian games from the stands.

Yet he maintains that when he returned to Munster in October he felt relatively good mentally.

"I think I'd had a bit of a mourning period over there. I had two weeks (of being outside the 22) and then when I came back I had a week off. I went away to Barcelona for a few days, just to go somewhere non-rugby, so after three weeks I had my head fairly well sorted out for when I got back playing."

There's no point in asking Stringer if he ever took his place on the Ireland team remotely for granted. Not because he wouldn't admit to it, but because he simply never would have. Being a regular starter, though, would not make you a good spectator.

"No," he says, now all too knowingly. "For those two weeks, from the moment the team is announced, the focus on your week is completely different. You're not really partaking in training. It's all about the team, and that's the right thing to do, and then obviously on match day you get into your suit in the morning rather than your tracksuit. You go on the bus and arrive at the ground, and you feel like you should be doing something. But if you sulk, and you're seen to be sulking, that's the worst thing you can do."

He repeats the mantra that there were no disruptions, there was no in-fighting. As for the rumour about his own fight in the dressingroom with Brian O'Driscoll after the Georgian game, he heard about that one only after returning to Ireland.

"Thankfully, I didn't hear anything about me while I was out there. Whatever was going on about other people, whether it affected them or not I don't know, but certainly I had nothing in my head to worry me like that. It got to the level that it was so farcical it was laughable at that stage. It was just another one to string along," he says, no pun intended. No, he didn't punch the Irish captain, he says, laughing, and emphasises, "I do get on with Brian. I really do."

If Stringer did struggle to maintain his normal precision and accuracy, then it's no wonder. A disc problem in his neck sidelined him from the European Cup quarter-final defeat on March 30th, leaving him with only a 26-minute cameo in the battle of Bayonne and the sluggish win over Italy in Ravenhill in readiness for the World Cup.

He never really shook off the cobwebs, not helped by the costly intercept pass he threw out against Georgia, which led to him being berated on the pitch by O'Driscoll. Ask him why he went from first to third in the pecking order, or if he had lost his form, and Stringer says, "I don't know. I honestly don't know."

Ronan O'Gara has admitted the huge disappointment of that World Cup will never go away.

"From a personal point of view and that of the team, it shatters you," says Stringer. "You start training in June for this one huge event, and the expectation we had, deservedly so, put us under pressure and we weren't shy about wanting to be successful. So to be knocked from the level we were at was a massive blow. It knocks the s*** out of you."

He cites the first-team run in the build-up to Munster's Celtic League game in Glasgow, his first start post-Coupe du Monde, as when he began to enjoy the game again.

"Just to get back into a team-run scenario after four weeks, to be part of a system, and things revolving around you, making calls and feeling . . .," he looks for the word and laughs, ". . . feeling important again."

He had a chat with Declan Kidney and said he needed and wanted games, so, unlike his Ireland team-mates at Munster, Stringer has played all of Munster's last 10 games.

Returning to the familiarity of the Munster family after the World Cup helped too. Foley texted him and said he could maybe get him a game with Shannon.

"I've said before . . . about this being an honest place. There's no s*** about guys here. They'll tell you how they feel. I think I got more slagging back here then than I'd ever expected. You know guys aren't going to pussyfoot around you. You know you're back home then and you can get on with it."

Stringer has been involved in all these January finales in the darkening Saturday gloom of Limerick: "You try to separate the emotion from the whole thing, to have a clear image of what we want to do on the day."

The challenge today is clear: defeat and a 10th successive quarter-final is gone. "It takes the season to April, and that's a massive thing for us and for our supporters. It's something else for them to believe in and save a few quid if they have to travel. It's something people have been used to, and we've been used to, but not taking it for granted. We've had to work hard for it. But yes, we're treating it as the last game we're ever going to play."