Given the heap of honours that Brian O’Driscoll may win at this season’s end, it seems strange to relate that, at its start, he went out of his way, for the first time in his career, in search of help from a sports psychologist. O’Driscoll is a straightforward guy and likes to tell you so. “I am not Jonny,” he said, in reference to Jonny Wilkinson, his former Lions team-mate in the No 10 shirt. “I don’t overanalyse.”

He will also tell you that he is “very sceptical” of sports psychologists and that he has “come across a fair few cowboys in my time”. But he does not mind explaining that, in the autumn, after the most average season of his career, “I felt I needed something to kick-start my game again, to just get me back thinking positively and reinforce something that somewhere inside me I knew about myself. I didn’t want another season to just go by the wayside.”

Thus has he had his wish. Nothing has gone by the wayside. His international career is only three weeks short of having spanned a decade, yet after a long wait, it seems that now the time has come to cash in his chips.

“I’ve been involved in nearly-teams for a while,” the 30-year-old said. But he recently won the grand slam with Ireland and tomorrow he boards the plane to South Africa for his last shot at Lions success. And today, the finest prize in club rugby finally awaits him when Leinster face Leicester at Murrayfield in the Heineken Cup final.

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All three are massive, each accompanied by a different emotional tug. “At the start of the year the Heineken was the one I wanted to win,” he said. “Then, all of a sudden, the grand slam crept up on us, and once you’re involved in that, you’re in deep. But I have badly wanted a Heineken Cup, not just for myself but for certain guys I’ve played with at Leinster, guys that have played for ten, 11, 12 years. Much as I feel I deserve it, I feel they deserve it more.”

Then, tomorrow, the Lions, which — let us settle this early — is not about redemption from that spear tackle in 2005. “It’s nothing to do with what happened in New Zealand,” O’Driscoll said. “Absolutely nothing.”

The motivation is derived entirely from having been on two losing Lions tours. “That’s the driving force,” he said. “It’s only about how three Lions series look on your CV if they all have an L against them.”

Yet this grand finale would not have been his, you feel, were he stuck in the rut of poor form and O’Driscoll has been around long enough to know where this conversation is going.

“Is this going to be an interview about the sports psychologist?” he said. No, not entirely, although it is fascinating that a player who is so blokeish and apparently self-confident should have acknowledged that he needed help and sought it in this way.

What he wanted was a fresh assessment from a new face and this led him to Enda McNulty, a psychologist who doubled as a 2002 All-Ireland Gaelic football champion with Armagh. McNulty said that he wanted to rejig O’Driscoll’s thought processes to remind him what he was capable of.

So it is not surprising that O’Driscoll can talk you vividly through his first international Lions try, against Australia eight years ago — the step round Matt Burke, the decision not to pass to Danny Grewcock, the pace to beat Joe Roff — because he has clicked on YouTube enough times to watch it. “If I need a pick-me-up and I need to have a look at tries I’ve scored in the past, I’m not afraid to go back and have a look,” he said.

But McNulty went farther. He encouraged O’Driscoll to give him a list of his best games so that he could compose an O’Driscoll highlights DVD for him. He said something else that really struck a chord, as O’Driscoll recalled. “Why always practise your weaknesses?” he said. “Practise the things you are strong at. What makes you stand apart are the things you are good at, so get better at them. Be unbelievably good at them.”