Sean O’Brien Recalls Brilliant Tale About The Time Brian O’Driscoll Stood Up For Him

Another brilliant story surfaced tonight on the Off The Ball Roadshow.

Last time round we heard a brilliant story by Keith Wood about the time O’Driscoll punched the head off Austin Healey on the 2001 Lions tour after he gave Ronan O’Gara a hard time. This time round another story involving BOD saving the day has surfaced, except this time involving Sean O’Brien.

O’Brien was on the show roadshow tonight and was recalling a time early in his career when he got a fierce raking from senior player Eric Miller, for being at every breakdown on his first training session, and BOD was not impressed.

It was one of my first senior training sessions, and obviously being young and probably overly keen the first day I was trying to make an impression, and some of the senior lads didn’t take kindly to me being involved in every breakdown but it was Eric Miller that came in and gave me an awful shoe-ing on the back.

I just looked around and Brian had him, I think he’d thrown a dig at him, but if not he was definitely choking him! It was a nice feeling to have knowing that probably the best player we had at the time and our captain was sticking up for a young lad he didn’t know much about.

O’Driscoll was then asked what he remembered of the incident, to which he said:

Sometimes those sort of things happen at training sessions, and young lads are almost sent out like lambs to the slaughter where they will be told it’s 3/4 level, where there’s contact at rucks but not really, and one guy is told secretly by the coach to go in and muddy their ball and no-one else knows.

So they’re at 100%, and everyone else is at 75%, so I remember Sean going in and doing that, and I was on Eric’s team – I think with new guys you’ve got to encourage them along and make sure that they don’t get disgruntled and feel out of place and kind of fearful of getting stuck in – so I do remember Eric being out of line, Seanie hadn’t done anything wrong and it was a kind of gratuitous stamping, so I just thought it prudent that I have a word with Eric.

What an absolute legend. BOD for president!