Perched on the bench next to Tadhg Furlong, Dan Sheehan could only watch, gut wrenched by the familiar feeling of a fate out of your hands. Plenty of times the pair had sat together exhausted yet enraptured, their front row efforts done but a game to which they had contributed plenty in the balance. Plenty of times, too, they had come out on the wrong side; the 2023 and 2024 Champions Cup finals, or perhaps most agonisingly that quarter-final night in Paris where Ireland’s World Cup dreams came crashing down. With the British and Irish Lions bashing on the door for a match-winning try at the end of the second Test, the memories came flooding back.
“I was sitting there beside Tadhg and he looked at me and I looked at him,” Sheehan explains. “He was like: ‘How many times have we been sitting on this bench in this situation and we’ve never won a game?’ And it was tough. It’s almost harder watching it sometimes.
