Brian O’Driscoll looks set to call it a day in about 18 months time because he doesn’t want to be a player whose career “petered off” at the end.
The Irish skipper has already admitted that he won’t play in another Rugby World Cup and has instead targeted the 2013 Lions Tour as his swansong, by which time he will be 34-years old.
Plenty of players have soldiered on long past that milestone, but few have taken the physical battering that the Leinster centre has copped over the years and he doesn’t want his career to mirror that of Muhammad Ali, who limped from fight to fight in his later years despite being well past his sell by-date.
Even though O’Driscoll doesn’t want to be hobbling around on one leg and with his shoulder lying limp by his side in a couple of years, he still feels he has a lot to give to the cause and is determined to prove it in the next year and a half.
Speaking in the November issue of Rugby World magazine, O’Driscoll said: “For me, the inspiration is about trying to be the best I can be, trying to show those who doubt me, the people who might think I’m over the hill, that I still have it.
“You want to throw in some big performances and win things and silence those critics, that’s important. But you also want to try to leave some sort of legacy behind as to what kind of player you were.
“I don’t want to be somebody who just petered off towards the end of his career, I want to go out on a high.”
The day that he is forced to call a halt to his rugby career is one that frightens O’Driscoll, who admits that he will miss the craic and camaraderie with the lads.
When he just was a young buck, O’Driscoll dismissed such talk as “man love” being taken too far, but the experiences of the likes of John Fogarty and JOE columnist Malcolm O’Kelly have led him to appreciate such ‘bromance’ amongst rugby players.
“Throughout the years, I heard lads talking about the end of their careers and how much they were missing the camaraderie and the craic, and I was thinking that they were exaggerating,” he said.
“I was saying: ‘That’s a bit too much man love,’ but I can see it now. I can see what they were talking about.
“When you’re involved for 10, 12, 14 years, that’s a huge part of your life. I’ve spent over a third of my life playing professional rugby, so it’s going to have a huge impact when the day comes that I’m not doing it anymore and I’m dreading it.
“Once you’re not part of a squad anymore, you’ll never feel the same with those lads.
“It’s a tie-in that nobody else can have unless you’re part of a squad. I see guys who were hugely popular with Leinster over the last few years, John Fogarty, Malcolm O’Kelly and others, and because they’re not part of every-day training they just can’t have that connection. They’re still tied to certain people, but not the team as a whole. That’s all gone.”
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