SIDELINE CUT:ONE OF the best things about Brian O'Driscoll is that the man who is blessed with uncanny vision on the sporting field cannot see all that well in the real world. As the Dubliner celebrates 100 matches for Ireland this afternoon, it can't be said he made the transition from amateurism to professionalism.

But his career has encompassed the equally monumental move from the old baggy rugby jerseys that sufficed for most of the 20th century to the padded torso-clinging oddities that are in vogue today.

Whenever O’Driscoll’s famous trinity of tries scored in Paris is shown today, one thing is immediately clear. Rugby looked cooler in baggy jerseys. It just did.

In some ways, O’Driscoll’s transition from being the great discovery of Irish rugby to the captain and lynchpin and, as of today, its latest centurion has happened without us noticing.

Before the calamitous 2007 World Cup in France, then coach Eddie O’Sullivan sounded surprised when he noted that O’Driscoll was probably more than halfway through his professional sporting life.

In professional sport, particularly one as physically demanding as rugby, every match and season becomes precious. In accumulating his caps, O’Driscoll has averaged about 10 international matches per year, which is an impressive rate of appearances heaped upon his club duties with Leinster and accounting for the prolonged lay-off after the infamous spear-tackle he suffered during the Lions tour of New Zealand five years ago.

The decade past was a fast, busy and absurd time in Ireland, 10 years defined by the delusion that this country had somehow, magically, transformed itself into a rich and sophisticated and unassailable place. In the prevailing mood of the time, it probably seemed only natural that the Ireland rugby team, so often the whipping boys for the “home” nations, should suddenly start winning, should have that audacity to beat England and Wales and to almost casually run home not one but three tries in front of a Parisian crowd raised on Ireland performances based on doomed bravery.

One of the craziest statistics in modern Irish sport is that when Denis Hickie sprinted for his wonderful intercept try in Paris in 1998 he became the first Irishman to cross the French line since Freddie McLennan in 1980. Eighteen years without a try! It is a flabbergasting thought now. Hickie’s dash presaged what would happen two years later when O’Driscoll cut loose.

But it is worth considering the state of Irish rugby when the Clontarf man first came on the scene. He is generally associated with the group of tyros Warren Gatland selected for the break-or-bust match against Scotland in 2000, a day when Ronan O’Gara, Peter Stringer and John Hayes were among five new boys.

But O’Driscoll had played in the previous autumn’s disastrous World Cup campaign and had been picked for the first match of the 2000 Six Nations, a dark mauling in Twickenham by England.

That 50-18 trashing seemed to leave Irish rugby in its usual state of flailing around wildly in the water without ever fully drowning.

A photograph published in this newspaper shows O’Driscoll grimacing as he tries to hold on to England’s star boy Jonny Wilkinson. It might have been assumed then that O’Driscoll was destined to endure an Irish career similar to that of Simon Geoghegan: flashes of genius locked into a bell-jar of misery.

O'Driscoll's promise had been noted the year before that and in an interview he did with The Irish Times' John O'Sullivan, he made light of all the attention, noting he didn't think he had done much to deserve it and that anyway "Warren Gatland doesn't pick teams on newspaper clippings".

For the record, he added that he preferred outside centre to inside but felt he could do a job in either position. “I’m not just a bosh merchant,” he said then.

Just two years later, in 2001, he scored that scintillating try for the Lions against Australia in Brisbane. Rendered aesthetically unbeatable by O’Driscoll’s pace (and the foppish bagginess of the Lions jersey), it remains one of the most electrifying rugby moments of the decade.

These weren’t everyday slouches O’Driscoll hammered past: the victims were Nathan Gray and Chris Latham. An English commentator said then: “The brilliant Irishman cuts Australia to pieces.”

English rugby commentators didn’t tend to speak about Ireland rugby players that way. Then, they didn’t tend to have reason. But O’Driscoll changed that. He may have been fortunate that his rugby life coincided with a period when the IRFU seriously got their act together, when the provincial system began to flourish on the European stage and when an unusually committed and charismatic group of elite players emerged to drag Irish rugby into professional era.

But it was his individualism – the pass-to-himself against Ulster, the on-the-money pass to Andrew Trimble (again in Paris) and the steal against Munster in the 2009 European Cup semi-final that punters and commentators alike have found so breathtaking.

If you watch that try closely, O’Driscoll begins reading it almost before Ronan O’Gara receives the pass. O’Driscoll had spent almost a decade playing behind O’Gara at this stage: he knew the form. He would have seen Paul O’Connell setting himself up to take the pass and crash, guessed O’Gara would push for the skip pass and was already in fifth gear by the time he stole the ball.

It was a score that summed up what made O’Driscoll so exciting to watch: mental sharpness and predatory attention, the jaguar’s acceleration and the explosive ability to transform a match by creating something out of nothing.

He did all this despite being one of the most closely scrutinised players in world rugby in a period when defensive systems and bulked up athletes made the gaps of daylight narrower than ever.

He did it despite being subject to some ferocious hits – the spear-tackle remains sickening to watch but even in Twickenham, when he took a knee in the jaw as O’Connell pushed by was a salient reminder that O’Driscoll has always thrown himself into rugby head first.

And for all the expression in the scores, he has never really been a showman: there was never much of the Campese swagger about him.

That odd triangle thing he did with his hands back in 2000 was the closest he came to cultivating an aura of eccentricity. It was as if even then he accepted that his role was to be the model citizen, the leading man of Irish rugby for the fast decade.

And so his public utterances have been almost without exception, pleasant, cautious and unremarkable: he became skilled in saying the right thing at the right time and no more.

Player of the decade in Rugby Worldmagazine; number 10 in Will Carling's all-time list of greats; "the best centre I ever played against" according to Australia's Tim Horan; the highest scoring centre of all time; there is no end to the tributes that have been paid to the number 13 down the years.

Whether O’Driscoll is the greatest sportsman this country has produced is impossible to quantify.

What is beyond doubt is that in a decade defined by deception and illusion and monstrous egotism, O’Driscoll stood for honesty and substance and courage and genuine, actual brilliance.

He deserves all the noise that his name will generate in Croke Park this afternoon and for once, he should milk the moment.

After all, he was right about himself all those years ago.

He is not just a bosh merchant.