The 'Terrigal Five' have been replaced by the 'Sofitel Seven', and are probably just as bored, the coach still appears more likely to pick our cuddly amulet than some of his fringe players but mercifully, D'Arcy now has a place, a pretty central one too, in the grander scheme of things. To prove the point, 10 minutes before this interview, he sits down with a reporter from French rugby newspaper Midi-Olympique, who've actually gone to the trouble of employing an interpreter to translate his words. He's come quite a way from the days when nobody would have been all that bothered about what he had to say in English.

His words, with the interpreter departed, are ones of explanation initially, something all the Irish players appear to have been doing this week. D'Arcy makes two points about his own contribution last Sunday against Namibia. "I had three full knock-ons and I didn't knock on that many balls in the whole Six Nations, " he admits candidly before offering an explanation as to why. "I had myself over wound-up and I was ready to play the game 10 minutes before kick-off. I spoke to a friend of mine at home this week and he was saying, listen, you need to be ready to play the game at kick-off, not 10 minutes beforehand."

Clearly there's been an awful lot of soulsearching this week . . . and last night's performance will have proved how effective or otherwise it has been . . . but D'Arcy himself isn't the type to get too caught up in it. He's been through a lot in his career, one that has, thus far, been effectively divided into three acts. Act one was the boy wonder stuff, his Clongowes Wood College heroics and subsequent ascension to professional rugby with Leinster and Ireland. Next up was the wobble, the near-fall from grace of a talent who had too much on his plate too soon and struggled to deal with it. Act three, meanwhile, is the redemption story, a tale of how a lost soul went back to basics, both on and off the field, and rediscovered everything that had made him so special in the first place.

As nice a story as it is, D'Arcy isn't too keen to look over his shoulder and make comparisons between the past and the present. "It's all about the now to be honest, " he says. "I had a bit of a blip on the screen last Sunday against Namibia but before that I was playing good rugby. I'll have plenty of times when I'm finished playing rugby to sit down and look at all the ups and downs in my career. When Denis [Hickie] announced that he was going to retire after the World Cup, that makes you stop and think for 10 minutes about your own career. But while Denis has that opportunity now to look back at things, I'm not going to do that for about five or six years. It's all about how I'm doing at the moment."

Still, he can be cajoled into examining the past, if only because of his natural politeness and overall good nature. "I was on stand-by but I knew I wasn't really going to be involved, " he says when asked about the 2003 World Cup. "I had a frank chat with Eddie and even though I was one of the 10 or 11 on stand-by, I knew I was number 10 or 11 on that list. But I was lucky enough then to be able to get back to the day job and play seven or eight games in a row for Leinster. I remember saying to two of the Leinster boys who didn't get picked for this World Cup, "You're young, you're going to get game time with the province while we're away and you're now going to get the opportunity to impress".

It was the same kind of opportunity he took for himself back then. While most of the Leinster backline were over the other side of the globe, either been overused or underused, D'Arcy was, all of a sudden, the senior man in the provincial backline.

The responsibility not only brought the best out in him, it also eased him through his World Cup disappointment, even if there was never a 'Eureka' moment where everything felt better. "Some people are intent on discovering whether there was a moment or a point or if you could get out a ball of time and stick a pin in it 'that's when I turned the corner, '" he says. "I'd love to say there was a particular point when I did turn the corner but there wasn't. I was training so hard in the eight months up to that World Cup that I couldn't train any harder.

The only time I trained harder since was this time. In the eight months up to that World Cup I was doing everything;

early nights, clean shaven, it was boring.

So it wasn't about me working harder, it was just about things coming together."

Gary Ella, Leinster coach at the time and a man much maligned since his departure from Donnybrook after just one season in charge, was a big influence on D'Arcy at the time. "Gary and myself got on very well, " he admits. "We had very similar approaches to rugby; it doesn't always have to be serious, you don't always have to beating the crap out of each other, it doesn't always have to be angry. We got on very well off the pitch. He trusted me on the pitch and he allowed me to have the kind of free role I hadn't had in quite a while."

Ella, with a little help from Willie Anderson, was the first coach to pick D'Arcy in the centre after Brian O'Driscoll picked up a hamstring injury in a Heineken Cup game at Lansdowne Road and after O'Sullivan followed suit for Ireland's Six Nations opener against France in Paris back in 2004, the player has been practically reborn. He seems a natural at 12 . . . his quick-footed, bustling style and low centre of gravity ideal for the position . . . but he would like to mix things up a bit for the rest of this World Cup, particularly against France on Friday.

"I'm playing at 12 but I think myself and Brian have probably got a little bit lazy at not switching around enough, " he says. "Brian's quite keen to step in there because in the first few minutes of the game, someone tackling you hard or you getting a good tackle in gets you into the game. I like doing that but Brian now wants to get a bit of duck and a weave, an offload, a nice smash and we have looked at changing the combinations a bit more over the next few weeks." Just so long as he's part of the combinations, he won't mind.