Dan Sheehan

Dan Sheehan has redefined what a hooker is allowed to be. The Leinster and Ireland No 2 finishes like a wing — his try-scoring rate is, without much argument, the best of any front-row forward in Test history’s modern era — while doing the traditional job to a standard that would keep him in the team if he never touched the ball in open play.

The athletic profile is the outlier: Sheehan covers ground at back-three speed, appears on attacking edges in phase play by design rather than accident, and finishes the wide tries Leinster’s shape deliberately manufactures for him. Ireland weaponised the same trait, using him as an extra strike runner off set-piece launches. Defences now game-plan for a hooker’s running lines, which is not a sentence that made sense a decade ago.

None of it would matter if the fundamentals wobbled, and they do not: his lineout throwing has stayed accurate under the heaviest Test pressure, and his scrummaging matured quickly from adequate to solid. The serious knee injury he suffered — and the speed and completeness of his return — only underlined how central he had become; Ireland’s set-piece attack looked ordinary without him.

He leads within a Leinster front-row production line that keeps supplying the national side, and as Ireland manage the transition from their veteran core — a task made urgent by the 40-21 July defeat in New Zealand that our database records — Sheehan is among the certainties the next cycle gets built around.