Two strange, wonderful and not altogether unconnected thoughts: Ireland have it in their compass to become the first-ever country in the professional era to complete a calendar year with a 100% winning record. And Brian O’Driscoll, their captain and still their best player, can now see properly.

It’s astonishing that he has remained a colossus of the world game for a decade with approximately 30% of the average eyesight, thanks to a chronic astigmatism in both eyes — an astigmatism is a defective curvature of the cornea, which in his case also made contact lenses unusable. Players talk about their debut being a blur. For O’Driscoll, rugby has always been a blur.

Until last August, that is. That was when he had corrective laser surgery that gave him eyesight as close to 20/20 as makes no difference. He says the effect has been “life-changing”.

“It’s brilliant, absolutely brilliant,” O’Driscoll said at Ireland’s camp in Limerick last week. “General life has changed but so has rugby. There’s so much more detail. I’m able to see the flight of the ball coming to me a lot quicker — before, it would have been a speck. I can see the detail of which opponents are in front of me. I can see the scoreboard and the touchlines are much clearer. Everything has sharpened up. It’s something I would have loved to have done a few years ago but the success rate just wasn’t as high as I needed it to be.”

The mind boggles at what he might have achieved had the surgery been done sooner. His surgeon, Professor Michael O’Keefe, was initially amazed that O’Driscoll had survived without contact lenses.

“Brian’s brain obviously adapted very well to the limitation from an early age,” says O’Keefe. “Now that he can see everything so clearly, I just wonder if he’ll still play with the same abandon, like the time he absolutely smashed that enormous Springbok (Danie Rossouw) in the second Test during the summer.”

There can be no fears on that issue. A more pertinent question this month is whether O’Driscoll will be encouraged to get full value from his new-found acuity. He was heroic in the trenches last spring, burrowing brilliantly for those match-winning tries against England and Wales. But now it’s time to open up his field of vision. And Ireland’s.

In the euphoria of the Slam, it was easy to forget how few risks Ireland took going about their business. The game analysis carried out by Corris Thomas and the stattos in the International Rugby Board shows Ireland’s game-plan was in fact extraordinarily conservative, even allowing for the generally negative response of the coaching community to the ELVs and to the sealing-off protocol.

From being the most expansive team in previous championships, Ireland became the team that passed least. According to the stats, only one Irish passing movement in every 38 contained three or more passes (compared to one in 15 for the other five teams). And almost without fail, the back row took contact rather than off-loaded.

Basically Ireland mauled, rucked and kicked more than any other team. If they keep this up, the collision with the dull, uncomplicated but highly effective Springboks will not only be a clash of champions, but potentially the most Neanderthal contest in the history of the sport.

You’d hope, of course, that Ireland have the wit to avoid continuous, full-frontal engagement with the Boks, no matter how attractive it will seem to the Lions in the pack. Remember, they aimed to biff and wallop their way past England and Scotland and only just about — by a whisker — got away with it.

Besides, Ireland don’t need to play like this. To encourage them to do so is practically a dereliction of duty, given the phenomenal talent available in the backs: O’Driscoll, Bowe, Fitzgerald, Kearney, Earls and D’Arcy, with a resurgent Shane Horgan in reserve, and kids like David Kearney, Brendan Macken and Andrew Conway on the way through. Only New Zealand and France have comparable talent on tap.

It’s a cop-out to use the current confusion and inconsistency of refereeing interpretation at the breakdown as an excuse to continue bogging the ball downfield. To be a genuine contender to win RWC2011, Ireland need to develop a variety to their game that unnerves the video analysts who’ve been picking them apart and also unleashes the awesome attacking weaponry in their arsenal.

It was thrilling to see Rob Kearney counterattack the Boks to shreds for the Lions, but it was also an uncomfortable reminder of how shackled he had been in the Six Nations. Teams will continue to kick to Ireland’s back three, nothing surer. So go on, give the kids the licence to play a bit and they’ll reward you.

In the spring, two of the most dominant voices in Declan Kidney’s coaching team were clearly those of Gert Smal and Les Kiss. At least that is what the stats suggest: Ireland were the most successful lineout thieves and nine of their 12 tries came from lineout ball. They conceded only three tries, none of which started inside their half.

Tremendous — but now it’s time for Alan Gaffney to make his influence felt too. When working with the younger D’Arcy and O’Driscoll at Leinster early in the decade, he gave them a free licence to run, using ‘never die wondering’ as a mantra. But during the Six Nations, we almost died wondering when Ireland were going to play some ball.

Getting the selection right is the first consideration, of course. Much ink will be spilled over the next few days over whether D’Arcy or Paddy Wallace should be picked at inside centre. A personal preference would be for O’Driscoll, with Tommy Bowe slotting in at 13.

Bowe has been scoring tries there for the Ospreys and looked a complete natural filling in for O’Driscoll in the third Lions test. Moving him would also make room for Keith Earls on the right wing — a player in possession of a truly special talent, which will develop exponentially for every minute spent breathing the same air as O’Driscoll.

You sense Gaffney would love to see the backs let rip at the Aussies next Sunday. His compatriots still think of Ireland as mullockers who only beat the Wallabies when it’s piddling down, provincial rugby upstarts who turn up for a hiding and the improvement of Australian stats.

Hopefully, he spotted the faintly dismissive comments made by Rocky Elsom about Leinster in an interview with an Australian newspaper last week. Asked if the Wallabies might benefit from some of the tactics that helped Leinster win a Heineken Cup, their new skipper demurred. “It was a very simple gameplan, not the type of gameplan that would work for the Wallabies. I think it’d be too restrictive on the talent we have.”

So Declan Kidney is eyeing a clean sweep to follow up his Slam. How he develops the depth of his squad this month will be fascinating, and the game against the Boks is potentially a great climax to a month of cross-hemisphere combat.

Just as important, however, is how Ireland develop their playing philosophy, hopefully away from the blunt if effective approach that served them so well in the spring. Thankfully, the skipper can now appreciate the full panorama of the pitch and all its possibilities.

But can his coach?