Cian Healy to equal Ireland caps record: 'It's very different between Drico and me'

Cian Healy insists that any comparison with Brian O'Driscoll only extends to them landing on the same record Ireland caps number on Friday night.

When Healy comes off the bench against Argentina he will represent Ireland for the 133rd time, a mark reached by O'Driscoll 10 years ago. It took both Leinster greats a decade and a half to get there and Healy, if he stays fit, is likely to make the record his own before the end of the month.

The 37-year-old ran into O'Driscoll at a friend's wedding a few weeks ago but this upcoming landmark occasion wasn't discussed. "I didn’t bring it up," admitted Healy. “Like, it's very different between Drico and me. I wasn’t ever and will never be the player that he was, so it is separated in that immediately."

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He has become accustomed to being in the spotlight for this kind of reason. At the end of September he became Leinster's most capped player, and admitted at the time that this is probably going to be his last season.

It was back in October 2020 that he reached the century milestone for Ireland and that was a tough week for him, given all the attention that came his way. So Healy has learned to shut a lot of it out to get ready for what matters. The action is the juice.

"I would try and separate from this as much as possible," he said. "I find any of the personal stuff adds more stress to my week than any of the group stuff. Like, 100th cap week was probably the worst week of my career for how I felt but there was loads of nice things said and done.

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"Whereas something like a Grand Slam weekend I can live it and thrive and enjoy it far better. 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."

Commendable humility, but what the Clontarf man is to Irish rugby is the great survivor. His career was on the verge of ending in 2015 due to a neck injury but he has played in two World Cups since then, with his plans to make the trip to France 2023 cruelly torn up just before squad selection when he was injured in the final warm-up game.

"I take pride in the durability and being able to show up," Healy reflected. "That’s something I do hold myself to a bit, not missing training sessions and enjoying the hard work week in and week out, year in and year out. I have enjoyed that.

Cian Healy at an Ireland gym session in Portugal ahead of the New Zealand game
(Image: ©INPHO/Billy Stickland)

“I do love it and I suppose I am in a place where I can’t picture myself anywhere else and that’s a nice place to be because you can go through the years debating whether you should have done X, Y or Z. But I can look at all of mine and say I was exactly where I wanted to be.”

Healy says that the body is feeling good and being in Ireland camp gives him that extra time to work on it. He puts so much into his prehab and rehab and that has kept him playing at the top level, albeit very much in a bench role these days.

"You don’t have to pull rabbits out of hats," he stressed. "You’re in the set up because you have a particular set of skills, your carry, your scrum, your lineout whatever.

"You have to come in and be comfortable in what to do in what you do well. I think that’s what is leaned on here. You're not coming in to completely change a game. Just do what you do well, that’s obviously what they are looking for.

"I wouldn’t be able to do this without medical teams and physios and rehab coaches that have put me through the ringer over the years. I could never say I have done something incredible without all those people.

"It’s more what you do at home and in your spare time that makes it easy to show up and easy to warm up. It's just my mobility and looking after myself. If there's anything bugging me, I don’t sit on it - I have a pro-active approach to it. All of that then works into a routine for me which winds me down for the evening, to get to sleep.

"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."

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