RYAN BAIRD HAS been making his presence felt across his two appearances at the World Cup. The versatile Leinster forward came off the bench in the win against Tonga and played the same role against South Africa on Saturday as part of an excellent collective shift from the Ireland replacements.
It’s no easy task to come in and make an impact against the Springboks with the game so finely balanced, but Baird says when the call to get ready arrived, he was thinking about his teammates just as much as he was thinking about himself.
“(I was) Definitely nervous you know,” Baird says. “Who wouldn’t be nervous walking into a cauldron like that, know what I mean? But it’s what I dream of, what we all dream of and it was great.
“(It’s about the) Body language you show to your teammates, the vocal energy, you want to make them feel brilliant.
They’ve played 60 minutes by the time I’ve come on. So I want to make them feel great, through how I play, how I act, that’s the objective.
“And once you’re in the game, you’ve got to trust what you’ve worked on for so long. And then it’s going to happen.
“There was huge adversity right through, even if we lost or won, it would be the same, because we had to navigate our way through so many different problems. Had they scored at the end, we lose but it’s the same body of work for the last 78 minutes. We’ll take loads from it but the positives are we held them out, play our game, we scored when we needed to it was great positives to take from that.”
Ireland found themselves under pressure in the dying minutes with South Africa camped five metres from their tryline, but Andy Farrell’s side managed to hold them out before forcing a game-ending turnover.
“It’s good analysis firstly,” Baird says. “We’re not going in blind, we have a feeling of what they might bring to us. Then it’s just mentality and attitude to protect our own line. Simple as, we’re going to give our best and not let them get over.
“It was lovely, it was a lovely moment. We showed our characters as a forward pack, that it’s not easy to just fucking roll over us. That was the most pleasing part.”
Afterwards, Baird found his friends and family in the crowd as the squad soaked up the atmosphere on a memorable night in Paris.
“We’ve had an incredible travelling support, we’re so grateful for them, you know, they are by far the best travelling fans in the world.
“Everywhere we go, there are always Irish fans. They said there were 30,000, I reckon there were a lot more than 30,000. It was superb. The fact that they stay around after the game is superb.”
