Caelan Doris perfectly primed to prove his worth on the Rugby World Cup stage

If there is one Ireland player primed to be a star of the 2023 Rugby World Cup then it is probably Caelan Doris.

While the 2019 tournament in Japan came just a fraction too soon for him, this one almost hasn’t come soon enough.

He often seemed a man among boys when captain of a relatively unexceptional Irish side at the 2018 Under-20 World Championship. Yet as much as Joe Schmidt admired Doris’s extraordinary ball-carrying, the then 21-year-old didn’t have enough rugby in him for Japan just over a year later, especially with Ireland’s customary array of backrowers.

With Tadhg Beirne and Iain Henderson also offering options among the locks, CJ Stander, Jack Conan, Peter O’Mahony, Josh van der Flier and Rhys Ruddock were the five backrowers chosen, with Jordi Murphy subsequently replacing the injured Conan.

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Doris’s inevitable emergence typifies Ireland’s growth in this World Cup cycle. There will never be a more wholehearted, hard-working team man than Stander, but Doris gives Ireland added dimensions with his acceleration and footwork, and footballing ability, for he is both more dynamic and more of an enabler.

Andy Farrell handed Doris his debut in his first game as head coach against Scotland at the outset of the 2020 Six Nations. Four years on and Doris has ticked almost every box save for a Lions tour, which he would have been a part of but for the concussion issues which forced him to miss the 2021 Six Nations, given Warren Gatland’s admiration for his performances in the rearranged Six Nations games and Autumn Nations Cup.

Doris is 25, with 31 caps, and after returning for the lockdown-affected summer Tests against Japan and the USA, is the only player to have played Ireland’s last 24 Tests in a row. What’s more, he’s started all of them bar the warm-up win over England.

Ask him where he can still improve and he straight away says: “everywhere”, adding: “It’s a bit of a boring answer but even as a team we’ve been discussing areas where we can grow. A lot of that is looking for evolution in your game, obviously, adding layers, but so much of it is going back over the basics.

“Paul O’Connell has been throwing a quote at us for a while now, I think it’s from a ‘CrossFit guy’, something like, ‘when you master the basics you go over them and look at them even more closely’.

“So, a lot of that for me is being more consistent with my footwork, with my carry, picking the right option in terms of tips or minuses, getting as many involvements in games as possible and breakdown decision-making. I had a few sloppy ones against Samoa, tidying those bits up, just trying to get it as complete as possible.”

Back at number eight against Samoa in Bayonne last Saturday week, where he seems likely to start against Romania on Saturday, in truth Doris’s performance probably didn’t scale the heights of his typically all-action man of the match display at openside against Italy.

Yet his barnstorming 30-metre, route one carry from inside his own 22 in the build-up to the opening try by Jimmy O’Brien was the highlight of Ireland’s entire display that night.

“Yeah, sometimes the direct route is the best option, definitely, especially in those conditions. Josh has obviously developed his carry a lot over the last couple of years, and he actually presented to us as a group last week, or the last few days, about some of the kind of things he has been working on.

As Van der Flier is “not the biggest man” as Doris puts it, accordingly the former places more of a premium on momentum and his speed on to the ball. Doris, with his footwork, says: “I am often thinking of getting in between defenders – footwork to not go directly at them, whereas he sometimes thinks just challenge someone in a one-v-one.

“So, I’m trying to bring a little bit more of that into my game, just to have the variation. Everyone is good at different things and his progress and his carry has been pretty noticeable over the last while.”

As to whether he had provided any presentations, Doris self-deprecatingly quipped: “I haven’t no. I think I’m doing the chip and chase one next,” in reference to his curious chip from about 35 metres out into the grateful arms of a Samoan player for a mark.

That he is willing to poke fun at is own game is indicative of a player who doesn’t particularly like being bigged up by ex-players turned pundits or winning personal awards such as last season’s Rugby Players Ireland and Leinster’s Players Player of the Year. The latter, admittedly, must have felt all the more hollow after their season’s anticlimax.

“I remember hearing [Jamie] Heaslip saying something like ‘If you get inflated, you get deflated’. Probably [in] my first year or two, I didn’t seek stuff out, but I did see more than I do now. I try not to look at anything. I try not to have anything like that in my head or any other people’s expectations. I think my own are enough!”