AS A NEW-AGE hooker – a freak who puts in the grunt up front one second while metamorphosing into a winger out wide the next – Dan Sheehan galloped up the right-hand side of the RDS that winter night in 2021, all 6ft 3in and 17-and-a-half stone of him moving like the clappers.
If Sheehan was a regular hooker he’d have used Mack Hansen, Connacht’s last line of defence, as roadkill, simply muscling his way through him and spitting him out the other side. He beat Hansen sure enough, but he didn’t do it through power, he did it through footwork. And it was remarkable.
At full pelt, he went from in-to-out and back in again. Hansen was hypnotised. He made a despairing flail at Sheehan in the style of a goalkeeper diving across goal in a forlorn attempt to stop a shot he knew was unstoppable. By the time Hansen picked himself back up off the floor, Sheehan was about to cross the try-line. You can hear gasps from Leinsterhanging around the back of a maul,” he says. Some, but not most. There’s all sorts of tries in there. “I couldn’t score without all the boys teeing me up,” he deflects again.
