On days like last Saturday, time can be like the onset of a head cold. It neither comes nor goes; it's just there, taunting you to do something about it, safe in the knowledge you can't. The trick is working out how to get through it without breaking the lock on the nervous energy door.

For Brian O'Driscoll and a few others, it was back to bed. For others, it was a walk outside. For others, a rugby league game between North Queensland and Manly on Sky Sports filled a couple of hours.

The squad's fitness coach, Mike McGurn, is always on to them about being closet league fans, even bringing Ronan O'Gara, Alan Quinlan and Paul O'Connell over to his old club, St Helen's, a couple of years ago to let them indulge without fear of reprisal. Not that anyone's going to hold it over O'Connell. No closet necessary as far as he's concerned.

"It was brilliant actually, " he says.

"North Queensland were supposed to hockey them and they were way ahead at half-time . . . 20-4, I think . . . but these Manly lads came back at them in the second half and only lost by four points in the end. It was a great 40 minutes of rugby altogether. It was great to have something to do, although I have to say, I found the day going a lot quicker than I expected.

"To be honest, we stay in so many hotels and play so many games that I'm having trouble distinguishing last Saturday from any other one this year. I'm trying to think of anything interesting or different that we did during the day and nothing springs to mind. That tells me that we were in the right frame of mind, that we were treating it like it was just another game. I know it was a massive one, obviously, but it's a good sign that we're able to treat it like that."

Lunch was tomato soup, brown pasta, chicken strips, chicken sandwiches and pancakes with maple syrup. McGurn has come up with his own line in fruit smoothies . . . last Saturday they had one made from strawberries, bananas and blueberries, blitzed with skimmed milk and low-fat yoghurt. Then more sitting-down time, killing minutes until 3.15 when they boarded the bus.

"Sometimes when you're playing England, " says O'Connell, "you can get a really bad feeling about two hours beforehand. The fear of losing to them can sometimes hit you really badly. It can leave you sitting there thinking that if you could just find a cab, you'd jump in it and head to the airport and get away to somewhere where no one knows you.

"That might sound strange but it's actually a good thing. I remember it happening before the England game last year. I remember the thought hitting me that we were good enough to beat them and then that thought led to the fear that we wouldn't play to our potential. If you don't play to your potential against England, you don't win. But other than that, it's the same as any other weekend."

Easy to say now, but there was a distinct feeling of being in control throughout the squad, throughout the game. In truth, the early Jamie Noon try meant nothing. The flip-side of never being able to get the start of a game right is that they've become more than adept at shrugging their shoulders and moving on. England going five up after 90 seconds wasn't part of the plan but nor did it scupper it by any means. That they dominated the rest of the first half surprised none of them. "We were always in charge, " says O'Connell, "but it was dangerous in that although I knew that if we fell behind we'd always have it in us to go back up their end and score again, we were running the risk of going behind with two minutes left."

Half-time was serenity itself. O'Driscoll spoke, Eddie O'Sullivan spoke, Niall O'Donovan too. The restarts were causing problems . . . all of England's first-half points had come from unforced errors in that sector and their next three after the break would come that way as well. Giving up 11 points from one of the more controllable points of contact would have ruined them in other days, in other years, in other regimes. Not last Saturday.

The rest you know. Nip, tuck, ebb, flow.

The Steve Borthwick rumble, the Denis Leamy trapeze act. Andy Goode locates shooting boots, England locate escape hatch marked 'A Robinson, coach'. And then a scrum, a chip, a jammy bounce.

The rest is hysteria.

During matches, McGurn ferries water and messages to the players and spends his time on the sideline near the action.

So it was that after O'Gara, he was the first on the scene as Shane Horgan touched down. In the bedlam his first instinct was to try and waste time so he wrestled the ball off the nearby ball boy and kicked it way.

It didn't take long for the fog to clear and two thoughts to strike him. First, the clock was stopped for the television match official to confirm the grounding of the ball, so kicking it away achieved nothing. And second, 'Shit . . . that's the ball that just won the Triple Crown'. So he ran and got it and hid it behind the advertising hoarding.

"I didn't think it was a try first off, " says O'Connell. "We were all standing together in the middle of the pitch watching the big screen but I didn't think we were going to get it. As soon as we saw it, though, we knew we were in so it was just a matter then of getting everybody together and deciding what we were going to do after the kick-off."

In the end, all that was left was the restart, the one thing that had been misfiring all day. Not this time, though. Simon Easterby, fresh in from the sin bin, took the catch with all of England converging on him. From there, it was a matter of keeping their nerve and ensuring McGurn hadn't hidden the ball for no good reason.

Afterwards, O'Connell felt relief as much as anything. His and O'Driscoll's were the first and loudest voices of caution, the first and loudest to speak of stepping stones and unfinished articles. But he was empty by the end. That evening, after the meal with the England players, he and a few others went back to the team hotel, had a few beers and turned in.

"We were going to go out maybe but everywhere was so packed and after the couple of months we'd just had. . . It's very mentally draining, not just the training but the constant demand on you to psyche yourself up. You've to work hard all week, making sure you're in the right frame of mind to play. You don't want to be going bananas heading out on to the field, you want to be constantly managing and controlling your state of mind so that you play to your potential. And that takes a lot of mental effort and it causes a lot of mental strain. By Saturday night, some of us were just done in."

So that was it. A few of them went to Peter Clohessy's 40th on Sunday night and by Tuesday, they were back in camp with their provinces.

And as for McGurn, he'd advise anyone who sees the ball Shane Horgan touched down advertised on eBay to check with him first.