Lions tour: Clive Woodward isn't taking Paul O'Connell to New Zealand for nothing. Johnny Watterson quickly uncovers just why the Munster secondrow is being widely billed as an essential part of the touring party

He swam. He golfed. He plays rugby. The 15-man game now rests alongside Paul O'Connell's early-life passions more imposingly than ever. Doing its time, enjoying its current health growing stronger by the year, O'Connell takes on the Lions tour as the Lions will take on New Zealand. This is a journey of discovery and learning for him, one of adventure and challenge.

Off pitch, the Ireland and Lions secondrow is an affable lump of smiles and understatement, intelligent and chronically modest. In kit he is a 6ft 6in, 17½st lock with both edge and presence. O'Connell has preserved the bullock and bite he learned as a kid growing up in Young Munster, the bottle you cannot buy.

With Ger Earls, "Gaillimh" (Mick Galwey) and "The Claw" (Peter Clohessy) the tradesmen he admired as an Ard Scoil Rís schoolboy, he has combined the Limerick, hard-nosed belligerence with an uncompromising work ethic and the one thing secondrows who came before him did not have, the fitness of a world-class athlete.

Young Munster, you begin to understand, don't do arrogance well, don't like their secondrows to ever go missing.

Out of the front crawl and the King's Hospital galas and a handicap of six, O'Connell has been broken from the Young Munster mould, a distillation of all their qualities topped up with aggression. His ability to concentrate that aspect of his game is deeply admired. Perhaps, more importantly, the 23-year-old has acquired a mind that works like a global-positioning system. He always knows where he is. He never loses track of where he is going and he understands that, whatever happens in his steeply rising career, he will never, ever leave the ground.

"Coming from Young Munster and coming from Limerick, I always felt I was the underdog going into team selections," he says. "I used to always work hard for it and that's where I come from. I've a good work-rate and a good ethic. If you are an average player you can make yourself a good player if you have work ethic and good fitness. Sometimes, you know, I wouldn't have the skills of some of the other guys, but I work."

It is this well-trodden path that has enlightened O'Connell and caused people such as Eddie O'Sullivan and Clive Woodward to want to breathe his air. An advocate of not trying to do what he cannot do well, while always trying to acquire new skills, he is constantly reaching without ever moving out of those areas he knows he can control. There is also only one person in the world that would describe O'Connell as an average player who works hard, and that's the Irish secondrow himself.

"To be honest, sometimes that's what I am. I think that's where I come from. I look at some of the skills with some of the guys and while with me they are there sometimes, they are not there the whole time. A lot of my game is not sidesteps and stuff; it's work-rate, work ethic and fitness. I'm very wary of losing track of that. I think sometimes when you are going well, you can start trying to do things on the pitch that are new to you, the kind of things that didn't get you to where you are.

"I try to keep honest of where I come from as a player. All the time.

"We all want to develop our games, increase our offloading, increase our passing and become a broadminded player. But, at the same time, you can't lose track of the fact that it is about being direct. It is about working hard and being aggressive."

AGGRESSION IS a companion of O'Connell's, but it does not define him in a negative way. His toughness is not malicious, but he knows how to handle himself and if establishing an edge in a hugely confrontational area requires lateral thinking, O'Connell employs that too.

Earlier this season in the Six Nations Championship he was suspended for two weeks for punching his opposite number, Robert Sidoli, during Ireland's game against Wales. The punishment ended on the morning of Munster's Heineken European Cup quarter-final against Biarritz. The timing suggested the disciplinary committee didn't believe the incident required them to cause irreparable damage to Munster's cup hopes. Naughty, but no hanging offence was the clear message.

"If you are not physically up for it and physically aggressive in everything you do after the lineouts, from mauling to scrummaging, to tackling, to cleaning rucks, you won't perform. A lot of aggression is being up for it. The one thing about rugby, especially in the secondrow and the frontrow, is that you have to be up for games.

"I think that is where I am mentally strong. I can do that. You've always got to judge yourself on your last game. In the front five if you are not up for it your performance is going to drop. Maybe in the backs or at openside you need to be a little more ice in the mind. You need to be cool and calm to take chances when they come up. The days when you slip, you can look back and say I really wasn't in the right frame of mind for that. It's nothing specific. It's about being a good team player.

"You've got to have personal pride. The work isn't very glamorous. It's often called the engine room. You've got to work hard so others can shine. It's a good role, a kind of selfless role."

Swimming was selfless too. Seal Swim Club Limerick. Trained all hours God gave him. Up at five in the morning before school and in the pool by six, he learned how hard you had to work just to get an equal footing.

"Jesus, it was tough work," he says.

Great days though. The Dublin galas, the Munster and Leinster underage competitions sprinkled his school days.

"It was great for discipline. Even at that age, 11, 12, 13, you had to be training 13, 14 hours a week," he says.

WITH GOLF IT was the same boyish obsession. All the lads in Limerick Golf Club wanted to play off scratch. O'Connell got it down to four or five and hit a brick wall - even playing every summer's day until the long shadows merged with dusk.

Then, at 16, he reacquainted himself with rugby. There was no falling out with the other sports, just the beginning of a different romance. "With the team in rugby you pull together, work together. That appealed to me," he says.

O'Connell looks up to people like Roy Keane because he wants to get it right all the time. He bucks the old Irish attitude of "sure it'll be alright".

He is meticulous. He keeps in shape. He rehabs his small injuries so they won't become unmanageable. It is not hard to believe that Woodward saw in O'Connell more than just a lock in the mould of one of his loyal generals, Martin Johnson. He saw a whole package. O'Connell's strength of personality expresses itself as much off as on the pitch.

"Woodward's attitude puts pressure on the player," says O'Connell. "I like that. It's a way forward. You don't want to have any excuses and I'd be happy with that. That's the way the guys on the Irish team are and that's why this year with Ireland was such a big disappointment.

"Now with the Lions I think it will be a great chance to see how other people prepare. I could end up going out here and seeing that other people's standards are way above mine. I don't think there have been any great secrets about what I do. When I think of learning from people I'm thinking of players like Wilkinson (Jonny) and Neil Back, the people who are doing really different, really special things. I don't think I'm doing anything really different or really special."

He's halfway into a deferred Engineering degree at the University of Limerick; he was halfway too, if the UK rumours were accurate, to taking captaincy of the Lions. Flattering, he says, but Brian O'Driscoll and only Brian O'Driscoll is the right candidate. Not for the first time O'Connell turns his back on the bouquets thrown in his direction about captaincies.

"Big thing is," he says. "Don't forget what got you there.Don't forget what got you on the Munster team. Don't forget what got you on the Irish team, the Lions. Be honest with yourself. Don't let others set your standards."

And just for one moment you get to feel what an O'Connell team-talk might be like.