No more baby steps as Garry Ringrose makes Six Nations bow

Go ahead, compare Garry Ringrose to the 22-year-old version of Brian O'Driscoll. Same position, same schooling, similar early coaching, but by January 2001 O'Driscoll had a World Cup under his belt and a hat-trick in Paris.

Ringrose makes his first Six Nations bow in Murrayfield this Saturday.

So we won’t compare them. Even if Ringrose has a win against the All Blacks on his CV (“Well, I didn’t get on over in Chicago but it wasn’t really too disappointing because it was just so special to be over there,” he protested ever so slightly) and despite the way they move in a similar predatorial fashion.

Ringrose is taller, for one, and broader but perhaps that’s just evolution.

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But we are not comparing them, not at all. Even if O'Driscoll gently suggested Ringrose might start the 2016 Six Nations. Or stating how impressed he was by the teenager Joe Schmidt dropped into Carton House training a few years ago.

“Joe had brought me in to make up numbers because there were provincial games at the time and I was in the academy so they needed lads for training,” he says, downplaying the experience of a lifetime for any teenager.

“It was an opportunity to go in and train with the best players in Ireland. It wasn’t an opportunity that came around to every 19-year-old, so I just thought I’d learn as much as possible when I was in there in those little windows, and then bring that back to the under-20s where I was playing at the time.”

Special coach

This is one of the many reasons that makes Schmidt such a special coach. Robbie Henshaw was given similar exposure while Jack Kelly, the current under-20s captain and another serious prospect, was recently involved.

“From memory I was shown up once or twice but maybe it was the way I reacted that the players kind of liked,” Ringrose continued in that mild manner of his at every media gathering.

But see his on-field demeanour and see the harshness, the raw determination, the spring to his feet after heavy contact, or demanding the ball to slide out of a tackle so effortlessly on the heavy pitch in Montpellier last October, or offloading from the grass when those feral All Blacks came to Dublin.

Next up is a showdown with Scotland's version of Garry Ringrose. Huw Jones fell through the Scottish academy net, having been schooled at Millfield in Somerset in the shadow of current English centre Jonathan Joseph, before the Western Province system grabbed him during a gap year in Cape Town.

Jones impressed so much that Robbie Fleck blooded him on the Stormers during the 2015 Super Rugby season and again last year before the penny dropped in the SRU. The 23-year-old snatched two stunning tries against the Wallabies in November.

That winding path into professionalism leads Jones straight down Ringrose’s channel on Saturday.

“Baby steps,” are how Ringrose describes his ascent. He talked yesterday about the value of being held over, of playing two seasons for the Ireland 20s, of Schmidt leaving him off the South Africa tour in June.

“It was all quite gradual and it just meant that it was never a huge jump.”

Beneficial caution

Such caution may prove beneficial. A lesson learned perhaps after Luke Fitzgerald then Andrew Conway both burst out of Blackrock College into the Leinster ranks, and in Fitzgerald's case starting for the Lions age 21, before injury disrupted two hugely promising careers.

Jared Payne’s terrible sounding kidney injury coupled with the incomparable quality Ringrose has shown these past 18 months is unmasked now. Murmurings of his ability became a common conversation after he zipped against the grain and reached over for his first Ireland try against the Wallabies.

He looked like someone else. A predecessor.

Now comes expectation and presumably pressure? “No, like, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t aware of it,” he says.

There follows a perfectly rational answer. Not that interesting, but flawless.

Robbie Henshaw's move to Dublin has helped in all of this. At 23 the Athlone man is already a fully formed star, hitting the ground running with an astonishing performance against Munster in October, considering four months recuperating after knee surgery, and then refusing to miss a beat when stood down for three weeks following the concussive hit by Sam Cane.

“You kind of forget how young he is with the amount of experience he has. It’s a luxury really at Leinster to get a chance to play outside him because he’s just so good and I’m still learning off him in training and in matches, any opportunity I can. I just relish any opportunity I get to play with him.”

No drama. No more baby steps either.