FROM THE BLINDSIDE:I’M NOT a professional rugby player anymore. I haven’t been one since May. You’d think by now I’d have gotten my head around it, but the truth is it isn’t all that easy. Little things still pop into my head, little reminders of what I’m missing out on.

Last weekend, I covered my first Munster game as a co-commentator for Sky Sports and I found the whole thing a bit of a weird experience. Maybe that’s how it should be. I guess it would have been even more weird if it had felt completely normal.

Small things had me a bit paranoid. I was travelling on the charter flight taking the team and supporters from Shannon on Friday morning and for a few minutes I thought about giving Paul O’Connell a ring to see if there was a lift going to the airport. Paulie only lives in the house behind me and I knew he wouldn’t have thought twice about giving me a spin.

But then I had to catch myself and think about it and I decided against it. I needed to be a bit more professional than that. I made my own way to the airport, sat down the back of the plane with the supporters and laughed off all the slagging I took about being a traitor and going over to the other side. The first time was always going to be the hardest and maybe I was a bit more paranoid than I needed to be, but I couldn’t help feeling strange about it all.

I’m finding it easier to let go these days, but in the beginning that wasn’t the way of it at all. I remember being on holiday in Portugal during the summer and waking up one Thursday morning towards the end of June and knowing this was the day the Munster lads would be coming back after their summer break.

I was lying in bed thinking, “God, I should be going back training today. This is it now. This is what the rest of my life is going to be like”.

I really struggled with that for a few weeks. That was the first time it had properly hit me that I wasn’t one of them anymore.

Some days it was really bad – I’d be bored and I’d start wondering what they were up to. I’d even go as far as visualising what they were doing in training. I wanted to go down to UL to see them train, I wanted to ring them and check in and be part of the gang again.

But I didn’t.

I knew I couldn’t.

I needed a clean break for a few months and so it was mid-August or thereabouts before I went back to UL to work out. I had to brace myself for that day because it was awkward for me and it was awkward for them as well.

I think everyone felt they had to come over and shake my hand and ask me how I was getting on. It was another strange day, but I knew as well that it was another step along the road to getting used to this new life.

The biggest step though was going to the World Cup and working for ITV. I felt more comfortable being so far away from home and having my main focus be Ireland instead of Munster.

For whatever reason, it felt easier checking in with the Ireland team than I had with the Munster team. I called into the team hotel a few times – maybe a few too many times because Brian O’Driscoll ended up slagging me and wondering had I been added to the squad without anyone telling him – and it was those visits that finally nailed it for me in my head.

I was able to accept I’m not a professional rugby player anymore, that I was on the outside looking in from now on.

This is a new world for me. I’m constantly finding new things in it that surprise me. One thing that kind of shocked me at the World Cup was how passionate I got about Ireland.

I think for the first time since I was a kid, I was a real fan. I was getting upset and frustrated when they lost and overjoyed when they won. Even as recently as 12 months ago, that wouldn’t have been the case to the same degree.

It’s different when you’re a player, even if you’re not in the squad. Of course you want Ireland to win, but you’re jealous too of the fellas who are getting in ahead of you. You’re always hoping that you might make it back into the squad somehow. You’re not even aware of it at the time but no matter how much you think you’re wishing the best for them, a little part of you is being selfish and thinking of yourself.

I didn’t realise this until the World Cup. For the first time that I could remember, I didn’t once have a thought about wanting to be in the team. It was over for me as a player and I was part of the public now. So I actually felt the ups and downs of the World Cup far more this time than before. That definitely got me into a better frame of mind for when I came home.

I can’t let the game go though. I still want to be close to it, even just in and around the margins of it. Thankfully, Sky have started to use me more and more and not just for matches. They sent me an email a couple of weeks ago asking would I go and interview a few of the Munster players for The Rugby Club. I had to think about it.

Even though the World Cup had done me a lot of good, I was still wary about clinging on too much to my old friends and my old team. But I went for it and I was glad I did in the end.

Even though everyone helped me out and could see that I felt weird doing it, there was still that bit of awkwardness there. I even managed to get into a bit of a tiff with Pat Geraghty, the Munster media manager who I’ve known and been friends with for years.

Myself and two lads from Sky were standing on the sideline at UL watching the team train when Pat came over and told us it was a closed session. I actually thought he was joking so I went, “Yeah, whatever Pat”.

But he was serious and he started saying, “Look, are you media now or what? If you’re media, you can’t be here for this.”

It gave me a bit of a shock but he was dead right. You have to separate yourself. I’m not going to be able to say nice things about Munster all the time and they’re not always going to be happy with me. They’ll still be my friends, but I have a job to do.

I don’t ever want to be blowing them up when they don’t deserve it. Pat and I made up very quickly afterwards and the interviews went great in the end. For me, it was another box ticked, another bit of distance put between me and my old life.

You’ll never go far though. My life is far too entangled with those lads to separate myself completely. Paulie was one of the interviewees that day and one of the questions I asked him was about the cat I had given him as a birthday present a few years ago.

This cat went missing recently and I gave him a hard time about it in the interview. I told him I was very upset he’d been so careless with it.

The interview went out on the Thursday night and nearly as soon as it was over, I got a phonecall from a guy called Eddie Cosgrove who lives near us in Annacotty.

“This cat you were talking about, does it have a blue collar?” asked Eddie.

“It has,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “it’s been at my back door for the last three weeks and I’ve been feeding it.”

So I rang Paul straight away and he went around to get the cat back. Typical. Some people get their lost pets back by sticking a flyer up on a lamppost – Paul O’Connell gets his back through Sky Sports.

I suppose the last major step I needed to take then was to cover a Munster game, which I did over the weekend in France. I was still a bit wary of how people would take me.

Would they be listening out for bias in the things I said?

Would they take me seriously?

Would I be able to separate my emotions and call it like it happened on the pitch?

In the end, I think I did okay. Castres started the game so well and won so many of the physical battles. There was so much going on on the pitch that I had no time to be worrying about anything else only the game. It turned out to be one of those typical wins that Munster have produced down the years – they didn’t panic, they kept possession and worked their way back into the game. And when it came time to go and win it, they had Ronan O’Gara.

Even though it looked like a classic Munster-style win, this is a very new Munster team. Only five of the team that started on Saturday started the last Heineken Cup final win in 2008.

They’ve managed two wins from two without dominating either of their games so far and nobody who has watched them could claim they’re favourites for the Heineken Cup or anything like that.

But the spirit is still there and the will to succeed hasn’t gone away. If that’s the last thing they lose, they’ll always have a chance.

It will still feel weird for me to be writing about them and commentating on them, but I’m getting more and more used to it.

I don’t have much of a choice – they showed again last Saturday that they’re not going anywhere anytime soon.