Open Side: The Official Autobiography. Sam Warburton

you’re our captain,’ he says. ‘Whatever you say, we’re doing.’

      From someone with more than 100 caps, that’s an endorsement I appreciate.

      Sunday, 2 October. Hamilton. On the bus back from the Fiji game, as pleased with the zero points we conceded as the 66 we scored, I’m looking out of the window when I get a sudden and rather weird rush of feeling: a wave of positivity and excitement. We’re going to do something here. We’re going to do something special.

Saturday, 8 October. It’s wet and windy in Wellington – when is it not? – so at least we’ve got conditions that wouldn’t be out of place in either Cardiff or Dublin. Everyone’s talking about the back rows, because whenever we play Ireland it seems to be a massive cock-off as to who’s got the best.

      Theirs is pretty good – Stephen Ferris, Sean O’Brien and Jamie Heaslip – but I reckon that Lyds, Toby Faletau and I have got the measure of them. Go low, Shaun says before the start. Go low at them, get their big men to the ground, chop tackle them all day long. Lyds tackles, I jackal. That’s how we’ll win our battles.

      We’re ahead within three minutes. We run what we call ‘pattern’ and everyone else calls ‘Warrenball’, Jamie doing his usual battering-ram impression up the middle and working the phases from that to put Shane over in the corner. Rhys Priestland nails a very difficult kick, given the conditions, and we’re seven points up almost before we’ve started.

      We’re never headed, even though Ireland do bring it back to 10–10 just after half-time. It’s a proper old-school Test match, intense and brutal, full of blood and thunder. They spend long periods attacking, but we just stand firm and soak it up, a red line spread across the pitch. When one team attacks and attacks without the scores to show for it, their self-belief inevitably starts to ebb away.

      That’s what happens here. By the time we get to the last quarter, we know we’ve got them. They’re only five points behind, but they look tired and under the cosh; and when Foxy (Jonathan Davies, whose parents own a pub called The Fox and Hounds) scores we know it’s all over. The Welsh fans spend the last 15 minutes singing ‘Delilah’ over and over.