O'Driscoll's free spirit shapes Irish destiny

Six Nations' Championship: World's best centre complements talismanic talent by bringing relaxed style to captaincy of Grand Slam contenders

As the seagulls wheel in the washed-out blue sky over Howth Head, as Brian O'Driscoll coolly contemplates the possibilities of the starring role in the rugby version of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, one of the wunderkind captain's lieutenants might himself be coming fresh off the pages of James Joyce.

Sometimes, even when you are playing arguably the best team in the world, there is a sense that your time may have come.

The winger Denis Hickie, valued more highly by tomorrow's England opponents than the Lions selectors who left him at home, talks lyrically about the springtime of opportunity that is lifting the men in green shirts and their brilliant young leader to the dream of the first Irish Grand Slam since those mythic days of Jackie Kyle 55 years ago.

"There was tension in the last two games, sure," Hickie says, "but our nerve held against France and Wales and we have come very quickly to this and we're not weighed down – we have come so fast from a frozen training field and our first victory over Scotland in 18 years to these warm days in Dublin, and one of our advantages in preparation now is that the squad is very Irish in its ability to turn off. We are comfortable in a groove and we take our lead from Brian. We can look at him and say, well, boys we have the stuff to make anything possible."

Stuff, for sure, to make the auld blood stir again beneath the English heel. In Dublin now, all avenues of hope lead to the 24-year-old O'Driscoll. Grand in his talent, talismanic in his presence, he has – you see in a flash – another quality that might be weighed in gold by his coach, Eddie O'Sullivan, as he measures the odds against victory over the behemoth England.

It is a soaring, insouciant style which first deters, then mocks the more earnest interrogation.

"No," O'Driscoll tells me, "there will be no great eve-of-battle speeches. I'm not Keith Wood [his ultimately impassioned predecessor] and why change anything?"

Why, he seems to be asking with some subtlety, try to be something you're not when what you have laid on the table has already dazzled the rugby world?

"We haven't done so badly up to now and we have certain advantages here," says the captain. "We haven't had to move out of Dublin. We have been able to do our work and relax, chill out a little. We know what we're up against. We know England are a great side. On the Lions tour I roomed with Jonny Wilkinson and Will Greenwood at various times and I know well enough what they amount to. But we have our strengths, and yes, certain intangibles are in our favour. We know the strengths of England, too, and if I got a close look at them on the Lions tour, I'm not going to say if I saw any weaknesses.

"No one can dispute the value of a passionate crowd, Our job is use to our advantages without getting carried away or forgetting quite what we are up against."

Ireland, he says, should remember the classic formula of victory at the highest level. They must put fire in their bellies... and keep ice in their veins.

You have to suspect that if O'Driscoll could change anything it would not be to do with the rhetoric of the big-game build-up, but the way Ireland's play tomorrow will be built around the ground-winning potential of David Humphreys' accurate kicking. With such a priority, the chances of the kind of tour de force which stunned and rivetted the Stade de France three years ago are remote, but if the captain concedes a degree of frustration, he is also aware of the practicalities of the sporting life. He may be an Irish dream but as captain he just cannot afford to be an Irish dreamer.

"Yes, from a personal point of view," he says, "you might hope for a game which would lend itself to more free running, but you have to look at the wider picture. My job as captain is to help create victory. That, in the end, is what I have to be about before anything else."

The neutral can only lament that every time Humphreys produces a tactically enviable touch kick, it is another lost opportunity for O'Driscoll to parade the kind of talent that has been missing from the game since the decline of the great Frenchman Phillipe Sella.

Another point of comparison has been the luminous running style of Jeremy Guscott, who says of the Irishman: "The remarkable Ireland captain has the makings of an all-time great and has become indispensable to his country. True genius always stands out in any walk of life so there will be no prizes for identifying the genius on the rugby field when Ireland play. As my old team-mates would agree, it takes an awful lot for me to be lost for words but there have been times when I've watched Brian O'Driscoll play when it is difficult to find words to sum him up. He is a brilliant player, easily the best centre in the world."

Stuart Barnes, the charismatic former England outside-half, says that to get a picture of O'Driscoll we have to think of the thunder of Carling and the lightning of Guscott, but others would say that you have to move above the meteorological office to get the proper appreciation. You have to float into the sporting heavens where style and effect fuse into the authentic shape of a sporting god.

O'Driscoll would roll his eyes at such a romantic notion. "I'm grateful for what I've been able to achieve," he says, "but I would never want to get too carried away." In this he may be something of a throwback to the days which he has never really explored but are still inhabited by the great legend Kyle, who, when told the other day that Humphreys was off to spend an afternoon in front of rugby videos, said: "For God's sake, couldn't he find something better to do with his time."

Inevitably, O'Sullivan's choice of O'Driscoll as captain has been compared to the elevation of the young Carling by the England manager, Geoff Cooke, but the Irish coach suggests that the parallel is superficial. While the callow Carling was seen by many as, initially at least, a glorified errand boy who once saw his command dwindle before the eyes of a gleeful Murrayfield crowd, the impression here is that O'Driscoll simply took possession of his rights when he stepped into Wood's place seven unbeaten games ago.

O'Sullivan said: "He is obviously a world-class centre and he thrust himself into that position back in Paris in 2000 when he scored a hat-trick of tries against France. The defining moment that showed he was one of the greatest of our time, maybe of all time, was his performance in the first Lions Test in Brisbane in 2001, when there was huge pressure on everyone but no one more than him, and he gave an incredible performance in that match.

"The captaincy issue came up when Woods had his neck injury, and the thing that swayed me was that the bigger the stakes and the higher the pressure, the more Brian responded. That is always a good marker for a captain and there was the additional factor that I knew he would win respect from every player.

"He is also a very articulate, intelligent man, and it all adds up to a very important package. With a young man, there is always the question, 'is this too early?' but I always believed it was a case of cometh the hour, cometh the man, and no one can argue it wasn't a good decision."

O'Driscoll rejects the patriot game of Irish rugby. Kyle and the man he is linked with so relentlessly, the sublime Mike Gibson, are, he insists, names to respect rather than to relate to in any forced way at this point which brims with potential history. He may be part of the tradition provided by his old school, Blackrock, but his own heroes came not out of the Dublin mist but the modern glare of Old Trafford's football floodlights.

Mark Hughes, the bull of a soccer player, dominated his first enthusiasm for the games we play. "My English cousins," O'Driscoll was saying this week, "told me that I would be a Manchester United fan and so it was. I loved Mark Hughes particularly. He was so tenacious – and he didn't score tap-ins."

Hughes, of course, had a furnace of a fire in his belly... sometimes at the cost of the ice in his veins.

O'Driscoll's extraordinary effect is to suggest an unlimited supply of both competitive commodities. England march into Lansdowne Road as strong favourites tomorrow. They are, everyone says, the best team in the world. But it is a status that will be subject to review each time the ball reaches the captain of Ireland. He is, for this thrilling time at least, the man of a supreme sporting moment.