It was one of the curiosities about last Friday night’s win over Argentina. One replacement prop came on to make his Test debut while the other drew level with Brian O’Driscoll as Ireland’s most capped player. Just the 132 caps between them then.
Thomas Clarkson was never likely to forget his Ireland debut but as it also marked Cian Healy’s record-equalling achievement it will forever make the occasion and the week even more memorable for the younger man.
“Even before the team was announced I kinda had a rough idea I might be playing and straight away he [Healy] came up to me and said if I had any doubts about anything during the week to come up to him. “It is typical ‘Church’. I am with him at Leinster the whole time. He is that kind of comforting figure that you have, as he has so much experience.”
Clarkson was initially brought on as a temporary replacement for Josh van der Flier during Finlay Bealham’s binning and revealed: “At the last minute I was looking at my notepad and he [Healy] came over and said: ‘Don’t worry about it, you know you can do it. Just get out and do it’. Typical Church.”
Such is the frontrow “club” that the debutant revealed Bealham had also sat down with him “and made sure I understood everything he was doing so I could do the same thing. So I felt really comfortable with him. A really good lad.”
He describes the experience of making his debut, with 10 family members present, as “a bit crazy” and the playing of the anthems as “surreal”.
After his five-minute stint in the first half Clarkson returned permanently in the 53rd minute.
“I had to cool back down and then I had to warm back up. I was still pretty nervous coming on. I wasn’t expecting 30 minutes as well, so I was just trying to just make sure I was going at it from the start.”
But he admits he didn’t succeed.
“I was running around like a headless chicken there for the first 20 minutes, the last 10 I kinda died a little. But I suppose that’s what you might expect, first cap.”
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Some debutants might dream of a try or, in the case of his friend Sam Prendergast, perhaps a match-winning drop goal, but for props winning a scrum penalty is nirvana, and Clarkson was bearhugged and backslapped accordingly.
“A bit unwarranted I think,” he admitted. “Everyone’s involved. To come on, scrums hadn’t necessarily been going that well during the week, so it was just about trying to make it work on the day and thank God it did.
“Like Faz said yesterday and moving on from last week, ‘three from three is a must now, [beating] Argentina, Fiji, Australia’. We wanted four from four and then having lost last week we needed it. I am probably looking at it from a different way to most people because it is my first cap. But I think everyone is happy. There were so many milestones you can’t help but feel happy.”
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