At around 9.30 last night Brian O’Driscoll had his usual rendezvous with Willie Bennett. A player who likes a late-night rub on the eve of a match, a masseur willing to work all the hours; it has become part of O’Driscoll’s pre-match ritual. More than that, he has lain down on Bennett’s bench with doubt inside his head, only to rise with the feeling of invincibility.

He likes, too, the way the masseur goes with the flow. If he wants to read or take a call on his mobile, Bennett moves silently from limb to limb. Then, on other nights, the conversation flows, generally non-rugby, and Bennett knows where not to go. “Feel better now, Willie, thanks.”

As he does on the night before every game, O’Driscoll then made his way to Paddy O’Reilly’s little temple at the team hotel in Stillorgan on Dublin’s south side. O’Reilly is Ireland’s bagman and goes by the name “Rala”. He likes to see O’Driscoll on the night before the game. “Ah, here he is, the last one.” Always the last one. At first it was just his fear of turning in too early, but the habit became law. “I go to see Rala to pick up my stuff and he might say one of the lads hasn’t been yet, so I will clean my boots and wait to see if the other comes. If he doesn’t show by midnight, he’s not coming and I go away happy.”

Neither would he have left Rala’s and headed straight to bed. Sleep, according to O’Driscoll, is like trouble: better to wait for it to come rather than go looking for it. So he moseys on down to the room shared by Denis Hickie and Shane Horgan, two of his teammates. They lie on the beds and talk; rarely about rugby, mostly about stuff, and he stays there until his body nudges him and says it’s ready for the slide to temporary oblivion. Generally that is 1am or 1.30am, and he likes that feeling. Eve of battle and he ain’t got no quarrel with sleep.

This morning he will rise a little after nine, devour breakfast and pick at the newspapers: so many guys with so many opinions that his eyes now scan and bin in the same movement. The team will have brunch together, and quietly he begins to think of what lies ahead. When the white jerseys with the red rose appear before his inward eye, he thinks: “Physical, hard, the need for total concentration, the exhaustion that comes afterwards.”

After packing his gear, he double-checks that he has his boots, his gumshield and his adidas under-shorts, for they are his passport, his traveller’s cheques and his credit card. Everything else, he can replace. They will leave the hotel about half-one, and he will realise that despite all his apparent coolness, the game has been seeping irresistibly to the surface.

He knows that as captain he is expected to speak to the team before they leave the changing room. Oratory is not his thing. “Whatever feels right at the moment, that is what I will say.”

The last time Ireland beat England at Lansdowne Road, October 2001, two players spoke in the dressing room; the first speech came from the captain, the second from his lieutenant. From the skipper came a passionate and thoughtful speech: we are better than them and we can beat them. The lieutenant was a little less subtle: “They’re English and we hate them.”

O’Driscoll remembers the two approaches. He preferred the first. “For me, it’s got to be calculated and precise. There’s more to rugby than getting your old tribal hatred going. That brings your blood to the boil for 20 minutes, but what do you do after that? Passion is fine, but precision is better.”

Then they will leave the dressing room and gallop into an arena that demands blood and thunder from these latter-day Irish warriors. From the English, they will settle for just blood. Because this is the game, this is the day. O’Driscoll may be a disciple of this new-age precision and professional preparation, but he still knows the score.

Win this and sleep easily. “I would say that for 99.74 of the Irish people, this is the rugby match that matters most to them. The other 0.26% of the Irish population? They’re the ones that can’t tell the truth.”

WE MEET in a conference room at a plush hotel in the centre of Dublin. He is in town to do some business with Gillette, for whom he just signed a deal as a “rugby ambassador”. So, I say, it has taken one of the giants of international trade to come along and sort you out. Can Gillette guarantee us no more facial hair, no peroxide, no red dye? He takes no offence. “God, yeah,” he says, “I took some serious slagging about the hair, but my feeling was if there’s someone out there who has a problem with my hair, and takes it upon himself to say it to me, should I be bothered? It’s just my hair. I mean, if you’ve got a problem with that, you really need to reassess your life.

“And to be honest, I thrived on the feeling that some people were bothered by what I did with my hair. I could have a dig at them without being rude. What people don’t see is that as professional rugby players we live lives that are fairly regimented and where people have total control over us.