A STEP AHEAD
THE SCRIPTWRITERS for Caelan Doris came up with a neat plot line for 2020. It goes like this: 21-year-old makes his Test debut in Ireland’s Six Nations opener against Scotland in Dublin. Gets knocked out after just three minutes and is taken off. Recovers so well that by the end of the year he has made the green No 8 jersey his own. Soon he is spoken of as a potential Lion. He finishes the year back at the Aviva, against Scotland again, and is Man of the Match.
It has everything – symmetry, redemption, a happy ending, all wrapped into a ten-month block. For Doris, it just feels like it took a lot longer. “Last February feels like years ago,” he says, grinning. His description of the build-up to that Scotland game is a reminder of how things used to be before Covid-19.
“We had a training camp in Portugal and flew
