BRIAN O’DRISCOLL believes Ireland can survive if Garry Ringrose cops a ban.
Ringrose was initially given a yellow card for his head collision with Ben Thomas of Wales which was upgraded to red by the TMO.
A disciplinary hearing on Thursday morning will decide whether further punishment is required.
But, with Bundee Aki starring off the bench, and Robbie Henshaw there too, O’Driscoll is not too concerned about the prospect of Ringrose being unavailable to face France on Saturday week.
O’Driscoll said: “I’m a huge Garry Ringrose fan but it is such a luxury to have three quality centres of that level. It is unusual for us to have all three of them fit. One of them is nearly always out.
“Bundee comes on and does brilliantly the last day. We said that about Garry against Scotland – one of our best attacking players. Robbie now is the common denominator all of a sudden and I thought he did really well.
“I can’t tell you hard it would have been, particularly defending at the setpiece as the only centre. And his capacity to read short and pout the back is as good as Garry’s. So we are in a very lucky position.
“OK, we lose creativity with Garry and he had a great game against France two years ago when he scored the all-important try at the end. But we’ll survive and that is the strength of this team.
“It’s not overly-reliant on one player and that is the difference between now and Ireland teams of the past when you would lose one player and go, ‘oh no’. That’s not really the case with this current crop, maybe save for Andrew Porter.”
And O’Driscoll does not expect the Leinster man to make drastic changes to his tackle technique if he is landed with a suspension.
He said: “When you think about the big concussion he got in Scotland a few years ago, it was significant and concerning but it hasn’t short-changed him on getting after those hits. It’s just his way.
“He has a great propensity to read plays, it’s his first red card at 30-years-of age, he got one wrong and in the modern age lots of players are going to get one wrong.
“Almost all players across the board are going to pick up a red card during their career, whereas in my career they were hard to come by.
“It’s much easier to pick one up now.
“Twenty minute red card, does it discourage you from going into those hits? Probably not.
“I wasn’t a fan of it but I’m coming around to it and that’s not just because of what happened with Garry because if you mistime something, it’s hundreds of a second and a reaction… when you accelerate hard, you accelerate in your fastest position which is upright – not in a crouch position – and then sometimes your acceleration gets you there too quickly to make that decision.
“It’s so hard, hundreds or thousands of a second to make a decision, personally I think it was just a red card. Not an ‘oh my god, red’, but just about.
“It will be interesting to see what happens at his hearing, but he’s gotten so many right that to get one wrong doesn’t mean you go back and reinvent yourself.
“Maybe he’ll pull it back for a few games and build confidence, get the quality back in again and then go back to rebuilding that part of your game again.”
