Donnacha Ryan, the nutcracker, what do we really know of him? A man from Nenagh hurling stock. A man who broke the concrete exterior of the Munster pack. A man who was lame but now he can run.

“In 2011 I was more or less informed if I didn’t play six I wasn’t going to make the World Cup list. I was always combating with Deccie (Kidney) to break the Paul (O’Connell) and Donners (Donncha O’Callaghan) partnership. For years . . .

“I wasn’t friends with Donners when I was trying to break through and was great friends with him when I decided to play six but Quinny (Alan Quinlan) and (Denis) Leamy didn’t like me too much. I suppose you can’t win.”

That must have been vicious back then, moving his weight onto such established turf; is it like that now in Ireland camp?

“Ah they were a different breed,” he said of the almost departed Munster men that twice conquered Europe.

“There was always that competition. I think lads here are very good at helping one another, giving tips and stuff. I was doing some tackling there after training with Seanie O’Brien...”

Watch matches

A different breed alright, Ryan feels like an essential addition to Joe Schmidt’s Ireland. He’s 31 now, a leader by deed and personality.

“I’m in a bit of Zen mode after ten months walking with a limp. To be able to run this morning is great, I couldn’t watch matches at all because I found it really hard just seeing lads being able to run. Even athletics.

“The questions you are asked are very tough. Questions by 70 -year-old women in the bank like, ‘how am I enjoying retirement?’”

It was an injury – he cracked the ball of his foot – that wouldn’t heal.

“It was a lot of risk getting the operation I had done. The surgeon said to me, ‘I had only seen this eight times before, two rugby players, one of them I know you know, and the other six are ballerinas. So I am held in high dexterity! Funnily enough, I have gone to see The Nutcracker since then. Got to hand it to them; you could see how they would have a sesamoid fracture after prancing around on your toes for an hour and a half.”

It’s how he tells them. That razor-sharp humour was drenched in misery as such a powerful man became lame.

“The one I have, if you can imagine your kneecap, it’s in the middle of your foot and it’s wrapped around a nerve and you’ve got a flexor hallucis longus, which is the tendon from your toe to the back of your calf, cut up the middle of it, take out of the bones, cut the ligaments and try not to nick the nerve, and sew it back up. I had forgotten what it was like to have a foot that wasn’t sore.”

Much complaint

The man who ran Ireland's lineout without much complaint when Paul O'Connell was laid low in 2012, can run again. The pain has passed but not before many dark days when he tried a dozen unscientific remedies.

“I was willing to do anything. There was a farmer, not too far away from me, basically down the road, and he said there was an old tradition they used to have that if a cow was lame in the field. He would dig up the ground and put the foot into it and turn it upside down. By the time the grass had grown back up the cow would be fixed again.

“‘If you want to go out and do it in my field you are more than welcome to do it.’”

Did you? “It was bad enough to be honest...no, I didn’t do that. There were a few other things I felt like doing which I won’t mention.”

How did he pass those interminable weeks and months?

“Took up geology. So I was looking at rocks all day.”

Anyway, no nerve was nicked, the surgery worked and 29th test cap will be gathered on Saturday in Cardiff. The first since Declan Kidney’s last game in March 2013.

“I was joking with Earlsy, we were saying it’s two and a half years since we played together and it was a nightmare in Italy, but by the same token it’s what you want to do when you grow up, you want to play at the highest level.”

Dead certainties not so long ago, both have been crocked in the interim but Keith Earls wears No 13 at the Millennium stadium, Ryan No 5.

Munster lamented their absence more than Ireland but their value to a World Cup squad is timely and will probably be accepted.