COULD PADDY Wallace be the missing jigsaw piece? The flair and potential of the Irish back line named by Declan Kidney is beyond argument, but in the November tests, they suffered a worryingly fallow spell. The selection of Paddy Wallace, who for the past three years has had to demonstrate tremendous patience as understudy to Ronan O’Gara at number 10, may be the slight jolt of adventure required to get Ireland’s fast men cutting loose. As he contemplated his first Six Nations start, the Ballymena man beamed from ear to ear.
“Yeah, I am delighted,” he said, glowing after training on a bitter and snowy morning in Limerick.
“I went into the campaign fairly confident after a good season with Ulster in terms of my own performance. You can’t read too much into training because Declan likes to mix things up, but I ran most of my time at 12 so it felt like that would be my more likely spot.
“This is my third campaign with Ireland so there has been a fair bit of time on the bench. But even though I have been back up at 10 for Ireland, I have become comfortable playing 12 for Ulster and the summer tour to Australia gave me a chance to prove that I was capable of stepping up there.
“With the way things went with Ulster and Declan basing his selections on form, I did feel I had a better chance for this Six Nations than in other years.”
Overall, Kidney’s first Six Nations team reads like a combination of the effervescent heavyweight names of the last decade and the brand new names. It contains Irish players who have been frustrated by French teams for seven successive games and those who have yet to face them in this tournament. Wallace, though, is somewhere in between. He turns 30 this summer and, as he grinningly admits, is “probably one of the older guys in the back line”.
Back in 2001, during a period of flux for Irish rugby, his blue-chip performances for Ulster and, particularly, for Ireland A against the All Blacks in Ravenhill, suggested he was destined to beat a hasty path to the senior side. But a broken leg the following season and the facts that O’Gara and David Humphreys had possession of the Irish number 10 shirt at lockdown meant the opportunities for Wallace were slim.
Sports careers often turn that way and as Ulster’s shimmering European Cup season of 1999 became a distant memory, he also found himself as a senior player in a club desperately struggling for form and confidence.
“We had a bad two years there at Ulster. It wasn’t easy coming in on a Monday morning after another defeat. The heads were always down and there wasn’t much confidence.
“Although I feel my form was good through the bad times, you are helped by a successful team. And I have noticed that in October and November the press has changed its attitude a bit. And going down to Thomond and obviously getting a win against Munster was a big watershed. That helps enormously and clearly the coach takes notice of that as well.”
There is great hope the backs will find their groove in front of a rampantly expectant home crowd on Saturday afternoon.
Irish captain Brian O’Driscoll recalled his first impressions of playing with Wallace back on the Ireland U-19 squad that won the World Cup in 1998 and, more pertinently, on last year’s southern tour. “One of the plusses with Paddy is he is a great distributor. It is nice having that inside you. He is a real creator. And I don’t want to talk him up here, but I played with him in the summer against Australia and at 19s when he was 10 and I was 12 so we know each other quite well and I always look forward to playing with him.”
Ten caps for Ireland is no mean boast but when Wallace runs out in Croke Park it will feel like a beginning, in a back line of blistering pace and creativity. “We have massive ambition here amongst the group,” says Ireland’s latest number 12. “And there is huge ability within the back line. It is going to click soon.”
