Jamie Heaslip, acting Leinster captain yesterday against Wasps and (we presume) Ireland in captain in waiting, came in for some intriguing criticism yesterday by the Irish Independent rugby correspondent Ruaidhri O'Connor.
Everyone who watched Leinster muddle their way through those 80 minutes against Wasps yesterday as if they'd never actually played a game of professional rugby together before was stunned. What must it have been like to play in the game?
Profoundly soul-crushing, one imagines. Heaslip, according to reports, wasn't in great form when fulfilling media obligations after the match and didn't disguise the fact. O'Connor described the Leinster's captain's demeanor thusly:
Jamie Heaslip, their captain after Isa Nacewa's late withdrawal with a knee injury, was presented to the media in the aftermath to explain the defeat but instead lapsed into the behaviour of a spoilt child deprived of a promised trip to McDonald's.
Short, surly answers and snarky put-downs might have felt good to the would-be Ireland captain as he headed back to the dressing-room, but having just led his province to a record European defeat he might have chosen a more humble approach. Asked if he was angry with the performance, he said he was simply "disappointed".
We found two clips of Heaslip speaking after the match and couldn't exactly sense the described 'fast-food deprived spoiled-child' attitude but we weren't in the huddle.
Heaslip has never really been good at post-match interviews in defeat, and though he may not have been as memorably terrible as some of his teammates yesterday, he was, to quote O'Connor, "anonymous" during his 80 minutes in the RDS yesterday.
Still it is unusual, to say the least, to see an Irish journalist deliver such pointed criticism of an athlete as high-profile as Heaslip. Ahead of the Argentina game, we wrote here about Heaslip's growing influence in the Ireland team with Paul O'Connell retiring. It'll be interesting few months for Heaslip, both for club and country.
