EARLIER this year, Eoin Reddan turned down a lucrative offer from Leinster, preferring to stay with Wasps until the end of next season. Walk through the gates of the London club’s dingy training centre in Acton and you find yourself asking why.

The grimness of the place has, of course, been central to the success of Wasps over the years. “Be Prepared to Suffer” urges a poster in the crumbling weights room. They’re just not used to the sort of pain they have recently experienced. Ninth in the Guinness Premiership table, Wasps need to beat Edinburgh today to preserve realistic Heineken Cup hopes.

Their scrum-half, meanwhile, has lost his place in the Ireland team to Munster’s Tomás O’Leary and faces lively competition at his club from Mark Robinson and Joe Simpson, so Reddan reckons he knows the reason for the interview request. “You must be thinking, ‘Jesus, Wasps aren’t going well, I wonder how Eoin’s feeling. Plus, he’s not playing for Ireland’. But I’m actually in a good spot right now,” he says.

We’ll take him at his word. He certainly revels in this particular spot of west London. Reddan loves the democracy of the place, the straight talking that goes on here – and there has been a bit of that recently.

For the Irishman, part of the reason for Wasps’ disastrous start to the season was their failure to adapt to the game’s experimental law variations (ELVs) and more stringent refereeing of the breakdown. In short, that means they’ve been kicking a lot more recently, with some success. Consecutive wins, over Newcastle and Edinburgh, amount to almost a run of form. “It’s not that we were victims of the change in the way the breakdown is being reffed. I just don’t think we adapted quickly enough. We lost a lot of games by four or five points and gave away a lot of penalties in possession.

“It’s the first time as a squad that we’ve had that experience of losing together regularly. We’ll be stronger for it. We ran out on the pitch with good confidence last week in Edinburgh, even though it was a make-or-break game. We just ground out a win, kicking the leather off the ball, basically doing what everyone else did for the first six weeks of the season while we were trying to run it.”

Reddan admits he fancies becoming a coach in later life. One of the main reasons he chose to stay at Wasps was out of loyalty to Ian McGeechan and Shaun Edwards, coaches who have done whatever possible to enhance Reddan’s international prospects – releasing him for Ireland training camps, tailoring training programmes so that he peaked for November and the Six Nations.

He’ll need such help to replace O’Leary. “I don’t think I did anything to lose my place,” says Reddan. “I just think [Ire-land coach] Declan Kidney went for a different style of player in the autumn. It’s up to me to keep on showing him what I’m good at. I’ve been in plenty of situations like this and I’ve come through all of them. You just keep working hard and trust yourself.”

Reddan does work hard, according to Edwards. “He’s still first on the training pitch and last to leave, same old Eoin,” said the coach last week.

The scrum-half also has welcome distractions. In July he’s marrying Aoife, his long-term girlfriend. To clear his mind of back-row moves and block-downs, he reads. Not exactly light reading – he is busy ploughing through Alice Schroeder’s biography of the US billionaire investor Warren Buffett. No doubt the world’s richest man has lessons to impart. According to the blurb, both Buffett and his buddy Bill Gates ascribe their success to one thing; focus.

This afternoon, Reddan and Wasps are focused only on Edinburgh at Adams Park. “You can get an angry reaction after beating someone on their own patch and I expect that from Edinburgh,” he says. Still, if Wasps win, they can overhaul Leinster at Twickenham next month. That is a contest being marketed as The Battle of the Capitals – and an opportunity for Reddan to show why he chose to stay in grimy old Acton.