Maybe this was why he started bringing the brown bread with him.
Everyone has to start somewhere and before he became a feared Ireland and Lions flanker, and burger salesman extraordinaire, Sean O’Brien was like anybody else – nervous on his first day at work and keen to make an impression.
Maybe a little bit too keen.
“The Tullow Tank” needed the protection of Brian O’Driscoll on his first day at Leinster training after some over-exuberant physical carry-on.
“It was one of my first senior training sessions,” said O’Brien on Tuesday night’s Off The Ball. “Obviously being young and very, very keen – probably overly keen the first day – I was trying to make an impression and some of the senior lads didn’t take very kindly to me being involved in every breakdown.
“But it was Eric Miller who came in and gave me an awful shoeing on the back and I just looked around and Brian had him, I think throwing a dig at him, if not [Brian was] definitely choking him, and it was a nice feeling to have, knowing that the best player we had at the time was sticking up for a young lad he didn’t really know much about.”
With O’Brien, O’Driscoll and Luke Fitzgerald all brought together on the Newstalk show, the jokes were flying between the trio, with Carlow’s favourite son O’Brien, who made his debut for the province in 2008, explaining how his childhood differed from his team-mates.
“I’d a different upbringing to Luke,” he said. “While he was in the Four Seasons I was picking my dinner out of the ground.”
Warren Gatland, are you paying attention? That, that right there, that’s banter.
