Having played just under 200 games in eight seasons for London Irish - three-and-a-half of them as captain - Bob Casey understands that he has earned a degree of respect on the circuit. There are still times, however, when he's pleasantly surprised at the loyalty shown to him by his hotchpotch, multicultural team. In particular, he is struck by the devotion of his sizable contingent of South Sea Islanders, those Christian guitar-strummers off the pitch who cause such mayhem on it.
He talks of Chris Hala'ufia, the Tongan ex-policeman and No 8 who is "the toughest man I've ever met." There are times on the pitch when Casey looks into his teammate's eyes and sees carnage - maybe an opponent has stepped over the line and Hala'ufia's expression suggests it's payback time. But it only takes a word from Casey to restore order.
"He's an incredibly physically confrontational bloke and there are times you can see that he really wants to go for it," says Casey. "But all I have to do is look him in the eye and say 'Chrissie, are you with me?' and he'll say, 'Yes, Bobby', and then he's back on the programme.
"It's interesting. The Pacific Islanders have a strong hierarchical system, with the principle of the chief. So they're unbelievably respectful of the captain. They'll just row in behind you every time, back you to the hilt."
It would be easy to assume he is captain merely because he is the only Irishman still playing for London Irish's professional team. His nationality is part of it, undoubtedly, but not the whole story. Casey is an easy man to follow into battle.
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In Ireland, we look at Bob Casey and reckon he was unfortunate to be born around the same time as Paul O'Connell and Donncha O'Callaghan. In England, they look at him and wonder how Casey can have won just seven Test caps, especially with Steve Borthwick passing himself off as an international captain. Of all the locks playing in the Premiership, only Simon Shaw provides more to his team.
To have gained some recognition from Declan Kidney last summer, when he won caps six and seven, was pleasing. The previous management tended to focus on what Casey couldn't do rather than what he could. It's true he's not the most 'athletic' lock, and that he won't top the charts in hitting rucks. That's because he is 6ft 7in and weighs just under 20st.
Casey can put that height and weight to good use, as he showed at the RDS last October, against his former club. London Irish had the edge at the lineout, at restarts, at scrums and in the trenches, and he was at the heart of everything.
"You'd have to look at first phase," he says, when asked how his team achieved the first major upset of this year's tournament. "You've got to stop a team like Leinster getting quality possession - you saw how dangerous they can be with good ball in the two games against Llanelli. So we disrupted them at lineout time and made sure any ball they got was scrappy.
"We put their scrum under pressure too. That was the idea - disrupt them at first phase and it makes life easier for you around the pitch."
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Naturally, Casey plans on repeating the dose at Twickenham next Saturday but there's a bit of poker to be played first. You ask him whether Irish have lost a significant advantage by the enforced move from the Madejski Stadium and he counters with the suggestion that the extra few metres of width at Twickenham will suit their 'wide-wide' game.
And that's the point about this London Irish side - they have a split personality. They can play in wide-screen format, all off-loads and running from deep, or they can reduce it down to basics, which you sense is more to the liking of their head coach and former prop, Toby Booth. You can tell which mode they'll be in by their choice of fly-half - Chris Malone to play territory, Ryan Lamb to play ball. "If you're going to win anything, you have to be able to play both ways," says Casey.
Twickenham holds more bad memories than good for him - losing the Premiership final last season, a Heineken semi-final defeat by Toulouse the season before that. And a disastrous afternoon back in February 2000 when Ireland conceded 50 points and the 21-year-old Casey limped around the pitch on a gammy ankle until half-time. If he had his time again, he'd cry off, but he was only 21 and afraid not to play.
When he ran out at Thunderbird Stadium, Vancouver, last May, he was comfortably breaking Kenny Hooks' record for the longest gap between caps - nine years and three months. There were times, such as when he was leap-frogged by the Matt McCulloughs and Trevor Hogans, when he felt victimised for playing outside Ireland. He doesn't let it bother him now.
"When you get to a certain age in rugby, you can't think about what could have been," he says. "I'm going to make the best of what I am as a player and the best of my situation and my club.
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"I love it here. I remember initially I was coming over for two years. I had some really bad days early on. We were in two out of three relegation battles, scoring one try every three or four games. But once we started getting going, I couldn't walk away. I'd put so much into it."
He'll keep an eye out on Tuesday for Declan Kidney's Six Nations squad, as he always does, but he has more immediate distractions - in Parc y Scarlets this afternoon. Casey admits Irish were complacent against the Scarlets in Round Two, and Pool Six was thrown wide open again as a result. What about the possibility of his two favourite clubs qualifying from the same pool? Somewhat surprisingly, he hasn't given that one any consideration.
"We have this motto - 'Win the next game'," he says. "That's our only goal-setting this season and that's what's written up on the wall of the dressing room. As a philosophy for the group of personalities we have, it's spot-on. The islanders wouldn't be thinking about pool permutations. Once they leave the club, I don't think they bother thinking about rugby, they're that laid-back."
Yes, but once big Bobby leads them into battle, they will follow.
Leinster and Munster in big pool deciders
2003 Munster 33 Gloucester 6 Alan Gaffney urged his players to forget the maths and get the process right. A miracle ensued
2004 Biarritz 32 Leinster 21 One more try and Leinster would have nicked two bonus points and won the pool. But this was the year of the Felipe Contepomi registration gaffe - no chance
2006 Munster 31 Sale 9 Having lost at Edgeley Park, Munster needed to win with a bonus point to top the pool. Paul O'Connell's savaging of Sebastien Chabal set the tone
2006 Bath 23 Leinster 35 Leinster's flowering at The Rec. Requiring a bonus point win to have any chance of qualifying, O'Driscoll and company ran riot
2007 Munster 6 Leicester 13 A proud home record ended in emphatic style. Leicester mauled the Munster scrum and Geordan Murphy stuck the knife in
2008 Munster 19 Wasps 3 The redevelopment of Thomond Park was incomplete but the effect was familiar. In appalling conditions, Wasps were washed away by Munster's intensity
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