It was really special to make my debut with Craig – Baird

A FEW hours before the bus left, he read the text again. “You only get your first cap once. Just enjoy it!”

Ryan Baird then switched off his phone, finished his breakfast and continued to prepare for the most momentous day of his life.

And even though Baird forms the new breed of rugby player, hothoused in professionalism, humanity still sparkled in the Roman sunshine.

Butterfly wings flapping defiantly in his belly as the oft-touted ‘process’, so robotically observed by the modern-day professional, unfolds.

“You would be unhuman if you didn’t have a bit of nerves, like,” said Baird, who, a year ago, was scoring a hat-trick against Glasgow Warriors for Leinster before injury hampered his impressive progress.

“You are going to physically front up against an opposition so that is all part and parcel of it. Just the excitement, I tried to soak it all in.”

The text earlier in the week from Andy Skehan, his former coach and director of rugby at St Michael’s, allowed him to store up a reservoir of seemingly limitless calm.

Andy Farrell averred that he didn’t spy any nerves from him all week; nor indeed from Craig Casey, the scrum-half who won an U-20 Grand Slam alongside his friend; indeed, they first soldiered together at U-18s.

Sporting brothers in arms at the anthems.

Terrier

“We’re both pretty motivated fellas anyway,” says the tousle-haired terrier Casey; so young that another ex-Shannon man Alan Quinlan regaled a nation with the tale of how he once held him as a babe in arms.

“It’s pretty cool that we played against each other at U-18s, with each other at U-18s, with each other at U-20s, and obviously making our debuts today.

“To be on the same side and make your debut together.”

Baird nods in agreement.

“We stood beside each other for the anthems like I did with him in Wales when I made my debut for the 20s,” he explains. “So, it was really special, I really enjoyed making my debut with him.”

“I really just wanted to enjoy it, take it all in and not let it go too fast. By the time I got to the pitch I was ready so I really enjoyed the week.”

The only pity is that family and friends were absent. There will, presumably, be other sunny days for this exuberant pair, if Baird’s approach to things bears fruit.

“It’s just another game of rugby,” he says, summing up his ability to pack as much into the final quarter of his brief appearance as possible.

“You’ve just got to boil it back to what it was and treat it like that. Obviously there was a bit more to it with it being my first cap and all that. But when I got on the pitch it was like, ‘Right! This is what you do and then do it again!’”

It may take a while for this pair to stop.