SHANE BYRNE is 33 and in the form of his life. So, is retirement on the horizon? Not a chance. This is a man who had to wait for his first cap until he was nearly thirty and now that he is in possession, first of the Ireland jersey and now of the Lions’ No 2 shirt, he is not about to let go.
“I wouldn’t change a thing,” Byrne, the man whose hairstyle lingers tragically in the 1980s, said. “If I’d been capped in the mid-Nineties, I might not be here now and this is as high as I could ever have dreamed.”
He follows in a rich tradition of Ireland hookers who have distinguished themselves for the Lions: Karl Mullen (1950), Ronnie Dawson (1959) and Ciaran Fitzgerald (1983) led the Lions in New Zealand, Robin Roe, Ken Kennedy and Steve Smith all wore the red jersey before Keith Wood, the man who kept Byrne out of the green for so long, annexed the position in 1997 and 2001.
So it has been a long, hard road since those early days at school when he played flanker, prop, centre (“You wouldn’t believe it now but I was a sprinter then”) and, in his final year at Blackrock College, that famous Dublin academy, hooker. The front row, though, was in the blood - Arthur, his father, played prop - and besides, Byrne recognised at an early age there was “more fun” to be had in the dark recesses of the scrum.
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Nevertheless, that first cap remained elusive as he rose through the Leinster and Ireland A ranks. There may have been times when he wondered whether it was worth continuing: “But I was a stubborn git, I suppose,” Byrne said. “When I was handed my Lions jersey for the first time, against Argentina, and I saw my name and the date embroidered on it, I couldn’t stop staring at it, it just made you want to smile.”
But it was Byrne’s game against Wellington nine days ago that clinched his place in tomorrow’s starting XV against New Zealand. He joined Gethin Jenkins and Julian White - his props tomorrow - and a player as experienced as Ben Kay handed him responsibility for the lineout calls. Kay has been accustomed to being England’s lineout captain but understood that Byrne felt more comfortable calling the throw himself.
The lineout went well, two very late hiccups aside, and Byrne bustled around the field to great effect. “You just want to be in the position where you can say, five minutes before they announce the test team, ‘I have done everything I can, it’s in the lap of the gods now’,” Byrne said, and now that the gods - or Sir Clive Woodward - have decided, he cannot wait.