Either the Ireland squad are on message about loving thy neighbour or the adage that familiarity breeds contempt does not wash in these parts. Eoin Reddan and Rory Best have 138 caps between them, of which 13 were picked up against England. Never mind the many meetings with English opposition at club level, there are enough international scrapes, certainly for Best, to have left a few scars. If so, none of them are visible.
Sunday will be a brutal Test match. And its least forgiving area will be in the front row where Best, recovered fully from the concussion picked up against France, will be head to head with the combustible Dylan Hartley. Previous meetings have been fractious.
“I actually think he is a very talented rugby player,” Best says. “And if you look at some of the stuff probably what he brings is more than being just a rugby player – you look at that Northampton team when he plays and he really is at the heart of the club. And he seems to be able to bring that into the game. I think there’s no doubting his rugby ability and off the pitch I have no problem with him.” So there.
Coincidentally it was a chapter in Hartley’s disciplinary saga that opened the door to Best boarding the Lions plane to Australia in 2013, so perhaps there is some sort of bond there. Either way Ulster’s spiritual leader is clear on what is coming next. “You know that when he plays he’s uncompromising, he’ll be physical, he brings an edge to the game and in that regard you know what to expect,” says Best.
“When you’re playing against him you just have to prepare for that – make sure you are on your game. Maybe that’s the exciting thing about playing against him and England: you know you have to be right on your game, right on the edge.”
Unlike Best Reddan has cosied up to English players at club level, rescuing a stalled career at Munster with a highly successful four seasons at Wasps. And it gave him an insight into how others prepare, not just the players in his own dressing room but the ones down the corridor as well. “There are one or two lads I’ve played against a fair bit, Ben Youngs and James Haskell,” he says. “They have a different mentality in the dressing room. They’re quite confident and bullish about the games they’re going to play and it’s a different mentality to what we have in an Irish dressing room.
“It works. It’s just a difference in nations and what works for each person. I’d say they’ll be coming here confident and rightly so after their first two weeks. From what I know of those boys they like the big games. They see it as a massive opportunity to impress and show what they are made of.”
Reddan has seen a change, though, in English demeanour since first coming across them in 2008. Although Leicester had only four in the match-day squad for that Test – which England won at a canter, 33-10 – it was perceived as a Tigers thing.
“They were probably a bit more ‘talky’ and all that stuff then as well,” he says. “I think Stuart Lancaster has instilled a much more humble, down-to-earth approach, which is not great for every other team in the Six Nations because it’s probably better when they’re getting ahead of themselves.
“They don’t seem to do that now. You can even see that with the personalities in the squad. Danny Cipriani, who I know well from Wasps, obviously you can see how composed and humble and down to earth he is.
“He has grown up a lot and improved in lots of things on and off the pitch and wouldn’t be near that squad unless he deserved to be there and had the right attitude. It just shows you the actions and behaviour Stuart Lancaster expects: if Danny is fitting into them, it just shows he’s quite strong in what he expects from his team.
“There is not so much mouthing off any more. That’s the thing. It comes back to what I was saying there: everybody seems to be quite focused on their jobs in both camps and I expect that will be the way it is for the rest of the week.”
Barring a Conor Murray injury, Reddan will start on the bench on Sunday, giving him extra time and space to assess what England will bring to the game. “George Ford is obviously giving them something different in attack,” he says. “They look a bit more potent. Like in that game against Wales – a good Wales side who played very well on the night. I think everyone who watched it knew it was a good standard and England managed to get an away win against a team playing pretty well – which was impressive.
“I was impressed with the physicality of it. I was impressed with the pace of it. And I was impressed with the error count which was quite low. At the end of the game I think everyone knew straight away that this weekend was going to be very tough for us, that they’d now have the confidence that playing away from home they could achieve that. It probably gives them a sense of calm leading into the weekend that they mightn’t have had otherwise.”
No need to alarm them, then, with provocative comments.
