DUBLIN-- When Wales last visited Ireland in 2008, Brian O'Driscoll exited early clutching his hamstring and if you were to believe the whispers around Croke Park, the centre was clinging on to his international career as tight.
Ireland's captain, then in the middle of a 19-game run without a try for club or country, looked heavy and sluggish, very different to the 21-year-old who burst on to the stage eight years earlier with a hat-trick at the Stade de France.
A Six Nations grand slam, Heineken Cup and third British & Irish Lions tour on, when O'Driscoll wins his 100th cap on Saturday and leads Ireland out for the 62nd time as captain, the murmurings of two years ago will seem utterly ludicrous.
"Last year was fantastic and when you win a couple of trophies you've been trying to win for a lot of years, it does make things easier and makes you enjoy it that little bit more," the 31-year-old Leinster man told a news conference on Tuesday.
O'Driscoll has been making it look easy for years en route to becoming widely regarded as Ireland's best player, surpassing 17-times-capped Lion Willie John McBride, the game's most complete front row Keith Wood and its archetypal centre Mike Gibson.
He is also one of the sport's greatest. According to former Australian international Tim Horan, no fellow modern centre -- not he, Philippe Sella or Jeremy Guscott -- can match O'Driscoll's all-round ability.
"In my time playing rugby and watching rugby he was certainly the best centre -- by far. He has the all-round package," Horan, no slouch himself over the course of 80 Australian caps, was recently quoted as saying.
NOT DONE YET
Anyone who has watched O'Driscoll spend the last decade gliding past defences and putting down opponents twice his size hardly needs statistics to back up claims for greatness, yet some of those numbers are quite staggering.
He has scored more tries than any other centre in the world and is comfortably Ireland's highest try scorer with 38. He is also the country's sixth-highest points scorer, a position reached without ever kicking a penalty or a conversion.
Of the 62 times he has captained his country since first taking the armband during the still dark Irish rugby days of 2002, he has lost just 18 times, another record that will long outlast his career.
For O'Driscoll, who has sat on the replacement's bench just once since making his debut in 1999, the key to maintaining that career so long has been level headedness.
"If you think that you're the finished article, you're finished," he said.
"The second I think that I have it cracked, it's time to hang the boots up because you've lost the plot. There's always aspects of your game that can be improved. The greatest players of all time, they'd tell you that."
Known for his blistering bursts of pace and nimble footwork, he is showing no signs of slowing down any time soon.
"I do know there's an end line in sight so it's about attaining as much as possible in that remaining time," he said.
"(But) I'm not done. I'm not chopped liver just yet."
