It's been the season of comebacks almost as much as new caps, and one of the very best has been kept until last. You wouldn't find a nicer bloke on the rugby circuit than Dominic Crotty nor one who has been more shabbily treated in his first incarnation as an Irish international, a 22-year-old full back thrown in four times on the left wing for a losing Irish side three years ago, and then discarded. It's been a long road back.
Tomorrow afternoon Crotty becomes Ireland's 47th player of a rollercoaster, 13-Test season. This, in itself, is as much a tribute to his own resilience and reinvention of himself as it is to Munster's remarkable season.
He admits he owes his comeback to Munster's success. On top of which a bizarre sequence of injuries to his full back rivals gave him a run on the Irish As, which he made the most of.
A simplistic judgment would be that his confidence is restored after an understandable period of self-doubting. "It's not completely unfair and it's not completely accurate either. I think it may have looked like I wasn't confident but what was possibly happening was that I just wasn't involved. I was in some ways content to do my full-back basics and that was about it.
"Possibly that was out of fear of being dropped again. When you get dropped, the last thing you want to do is get dropped again. So I was probably being very safe, whereas this year I got a lot more involved and things that I was doing last year which weren't coming off suddenly started coming off for me. That did give me a lot more confidence and things just started following on from there."
He's entitled to feel aggrieved over his treatment three years ago. "I suppose at the time I did feel I wasn't given as much of a chance as others may have been given. Playing out of position is always difficult, especially at international level. "You only have to look at the guys I actually marked to see what sort of class players I was up against. The four guys I was up against were Jason Little, Emile Ntamack, Paolo Vaccari and Ieuan Evans." Being dropped by Ireland was one thing, being dropped last season by Munster was something else. "Because I've always said that if I don't make the Munster team I'd probably retire after basically being full-time since I was 18. So I had to have a long hard chat with myself then and see where I was going and re-appraise other things like career and that," he says.
Having got married only last Tuesday week, he obviously hadn't planned on making a return to the Irish team by the time of this tour. "No, I hadn't. People said it to me as soon as we got engaged. `Listen, what happens if you're picked on the tour?' and I just brushed it off saying `look, there's no way that is ever going to happen'.
"In some ways it's like getting your first cap all over again. It's a weird sort of feeling. I remember what Philip Danaher said to me after I got dropped, 'cos he was Garryowen coach at the time, that you're not a real international until you get dropped and then come back."
Canada have made four changes to the team which lost 51-18 to South Africa last Saturday for tomorrow's game. Rod Snow returns at loosehead, Ed Knaggs replaces the absent Al Charron, Ryan Banks comes in at open side and Mark Irvine replaces the injured Fred Asselin on the wing, with Philip Murphy, who played for the Irish schools four times in the 1994-95 season, retained at number eight.
CANADA: W Stanley; M Irvine, N Witkowski, K Nichols (capt), S Fauth; S Stewart, M Williams; R Snow, P Dunkley, J Thiel; J Tait, E Knaggs; G Dixon, P Murphy, R Banks.
