![Jamison Gibson-Park: 'Ultimately I can see what they [World Rugby] are trying to do. They want a cleaner, faster game, so I think it certainly makes sense.' Photograph: Ben Brady/Inpho](https://www.irishtimes.com/resizer/v2/OD6LH4SDFIKTN6I552MEKPGK5M.jpg?auth=5379bfddeead5eff65093add3717b472df9882ccad5878707fdd61d99ec419a1&smart=true&width=1024&height=683)
Half his right eye is blood red, and underneath high on his cheek is a thin pink line where the skin was broken by a Bath player’s head in Leinster’s last Champions Cup match.
“Yeah, it’s coming along okay,” he says. “It’s a cut that wasn’t too bad. I got away with one.”
Jamison Gibson-Park may be better known for his light feet, smooth passing and playing as the Irish team metronome but his willingness to throw himself into tackles, almost always against bigger players, has become a heart-stopping part of his game. Bath was no different. Bone meets soft flesh.
Who will start at 10 for Ireland during the Six Nations?
As much as his sniping and awareness make him one of Simon Easterby’s key players facing into the opening Six Nations game against England on Saturday, the Ireland scrumhalf has added a tackling game that the coaches encourage much more enthusiastically than the medical team.
Ireland name team to play England: Prendergast ‘the right man this weekend’ says Easterby
Ireland v England: Simon Easterby puts his stamp on side with Ryan Baird selection
Stafford McDowall to partner Huw Jones at centre for Scotland against Italy
Six Nations guide to Scotland: Fixtures, prospects and who to watch
“The coaches are saying get stuck in, the physios are saying get out,” he says.
“Probably my first love would be to play differently but it’s an area of my game that I’ve been trying to grow and continue to try and grow. I’m obviously lucky to be blessed with some pretty awesome defensive coaches and Si [Easterby] here and Jacques [Nienaber] back at Leinster.
“I think to get stuck into that area you have to be smart as well and realise there is risk attached, especially when the other guys are nearly double your weight. So, I suppose it’s just [being] smart around that.”
Gibson-Park is an intelligent player with ingenuity and flair and changes in the laws, which are designed to keep the ball in play for longer with less stoppages, will help his trade. Adapt to the changes or die seems melodramatic but the stakes are high.
Tadhg Beirne is close to despair over it, but the wispy scrumhalves will be better protected at the ruck and have more time to get the ball into play before facing ill-intentioned flankers and locks.
He is, he says, both an instinctive player and one who will swot the clips on the laptop to understand the nuances of the changes and the possibilities for his game in both defence and attack. On the face of it, the tweaks give the nines a better platform to play ball.
“Little bit of both,” he says of playing it as he sees it in real time and studying set-piece options. “There are loads of ways of going about it, but ultimately you get on the pitch, there is a bit of a feel, so yeah that’s where the more instinctive part of it comes into it.”
At scrums, too, the nine on the ball will be better protected as the scrumhalf not in possession may not go past the centre of the tunnel.
Given both of their influences, what Gibson-Park and his England opposite, Alex Mitchell, do with the extra fractions of time, will be pivotal to how the play unfolds at the Aviva Stadium on Saturday.
A more fluid game with less stoppages will also knock on to how long front row players will remain on the pitch before the bench begins to roll on.
“Ultimately I can see what they’re trying to do. They want a cleaner, faster game, so I think it certainly makes sense from that point of view,” he says. “I don’t mind it. I feel the forwards probably have a different opinion, but it’s kind of the way the game is going.
“That [scrum] is one of the tricky ones. We’re probably one of the teams that would have tried to take advantage of being able to go and put pressure on the base, so that’s gone now. Obviously, we’ve had to rethink our set-ups and that. That’s all part of the evolution of the game. We’ve got a few clever guys, who are in charge of us and that helps.”
Talk of winning three Six Nations in a row has been tamped down. But Gibson-Park knows that a win in the first match, reversing last year’s defeat in Twickenham, would be an energy giver and momentum swing. The week spent in the Algarve at Quinta do Lago was largely geared towards getting the first match right.
England had the same idea, choosing Girona in the north-east of Spain for their camp knowing that playing in Dublin against an Irish team ranked at number two in the world and five places above them will be a challenge.
“I wouldn’t say massive,” Gibson-Park says of three-in-a-row conversations. “It’s been mentioned but we’re pretty week-to-week focused in here. It’s a cliche answer that you’re used to getting. But it’s an incredible opportunity to get after, so we’ll get stuck in.”
Doubtless, he will.
