Reddan back in harness for Leinster

A new season for a wise head. Fresh eyes are what Eoin Reddan hopes will see him back to his shirt with Leinster and Ireland. His leg break back in March ticked all the hair-raising boxes for the squeamish: players turning away; oxygen administered; stretcher.

Five months on and the bones around his ankle have long healed, although, in instances like this, the mind occasionally follows at a slower pace.

But Reddan, despite the missed opportunities at the end of the season with Leinster in the league and Heineken Cup and the international summer tour to the USA and Canada, is hard-wired to see what a new season can bring, not what the old one took away.

A campaign is always driven by the stick and carrot and there’s an added interest in that coach Matt O’Connor has as much to prove as his players.

Reddan, if it is in the wildest realms of anyone's thinking to see a broken leg as a positive thing, can point to one of his best pre-seasons ever.

Better shape
"It means you can work at other things and come back in better shape than before you were injured. I was training right through the summer," he says.

“You can look at the positives and say ‘okay, I’m starting the season fresh’, but yeah, you miss the big games that you want to be playing in and that was definitely hard near the end of last season.

“Missing the summer tour is never a good idea but if you are faced with it, I got in a lot more weights, double the amount of weights. Then you are just praying you can bring all that you have done in the gym back on to the pitch. You worry that that doesn’t always translate so it would be good if it can and if you do then maybe you’ve gotten back a little bit of that loss.”

Eoin O’Malley’s name still echoes around the training ground. At 25 years old, his forced retirement with a knee injury tempers any impulse for others to feel unduly unfortunate. It’s almost like a bad leg break. Get over it.

“It’s terrible. It’s very, very tough, a massive loss,” he says of O’Malley, one of the leading centres being groomed to step in for Brian O’Driscoll.

“It does make you realise how lucky you are, if you didn’t know it already . . .it’s sad.”

Reddan came on in the second half against Northampton last Friday in Donnybrook as O’Connor emptied his bench.

There's a new accent on the scrum laws to get used to; Isaac Boss is still there, Jimmy Gopperth at outhalf in his first season and Ireland under 20 Luke McGrath, who brings determination and pedigree and who started at scrumhalf last week.

Hefty knocks
"I got people to take me down a few times, fairly hefty knocks on that area. Coming back I can be confident in the ankle itself," he says, burying the issue and pushing on to Llanelli and Leinster's first match, away on Friday.

Tradition there says the team are slow starters and although it hasn’t dented their capacity to regularly win silverware, it’s an area to be tidied up.

“He (Matt O’Connor) knows what he wants,” says Reddan. “He has incredible knowledge of the game and we want to get going early on in the year because that’s somewhere we have fallen down in the recent past. I mean we haven’t won a first game for seven seasons.

“He’s very positive, very fresh and he’s a good communicator and he’s good at teaching people what he wants them to do, which is key because knowing what you want your team to do and teaching them that are two different things.”

This week Leinster will know exactly what O'Connor wants but it's in May he will be judged not August. Joe Schmidt lost five out of his first six matches with Leinster.

“The model here has always been that the coaches set the game plan. We all have a job. We look after ourselves and trust the guy next to you to do it well,” says Reddan.

“We’re lucky we’ve had coaches who have had the knowledge to push that on and Matt is no different.”