| Brendan Gallagher, The Daily Telegraph, 23rd February 2007
 There is a maturity and calmness about
Gordon D'Arcy in the Ireland midfield these days - a sense of having arrived - that belies his earlier reputation as an erratic young tyro, a 'broth of an Irish boy' prone to push the self-destruct button on and off the pitch. Something has changed.
This is the brilliant young firebrand of a centre who, by his own admission, did his best to drink and party away his exceptional talent after leaving school and graduating directly into the Ireland squad for the 1999 World Cup.
Always engaging and intelligent, you could sense that perhaps D'Arcy didn't think rugby was a proper job - there had to be much more to life - and his form of rebellion was excess.
Happily for Ireland, he eventually got his head around the needs and disciplines of professional rugby, for which Matt Williams must take a good deal of credit during his stint as Leinster coach.
However, D'Arcy's 'failure' on the 2005 Lions tour - he had rushed back far too soon from a catalogue of serious injuries, although objectively he was no more disappointing than many others - again had him questioning things.
But there is rarely time to take stock in the mad world of international sport. The 2006 season soon came and went and, fully fit again, he was exceptional for Triple Crown-winning Ireland and impressed in two Tests against New Zealand.
Then, finally, it was time for a proper break. There was a windsurfing expedition off the Clare coast, visits to music festivals around Ireland and Spain, including Pamplona where he took in the 'Bull run' and, best of all, a stint with the Irish sports charity GOAL in Calcutta, where his sister Megan was already a charity worker.
"It is true what they say, such visits change your life," D'Arcy admits. "They have so little, you have so much in comparison. Yet they are so positive and hopeful in adversity, and make so much from so little. You arrive as a helper, but it's a two-way process. You return home a different person, thankful for everything you have and absolutely determined to make the best of your very good fortune."
Even during the disappointment of a tough Lions tour of New Zealand, you could see that D'Arcy was a 'natural' in such circumstances. The Lions did more than their fair share of visits to schools and hospitals, but when they copped some unfair flak the day before the Otago match in Dunedin, for having to cancel a hospital visit, it was D'Arcy who promptly gave up a day off in Christchurch and headed south with a small party laden with Lions 'goodies'
"The level of poverty in Calcutta is shocking, but equally surprising is the positivity people have and how happy they are," D'Arcy adds. "When you think of poverty you automatically think of people begging, but in Calcutta most people I saw were looking to help themselves. Nobody had their hand out.
"I was particularly affected by the red light district in Calcutta. The GOAL team had warned me to prepare myself but I thought, well nothing has really hit me for six yet, I'll be fine. But as we approached, we saw probably 200 girls lined up on either side of a narrow street, a 400-strong guard of honour of prostitutes. Some of them couldn't have been 14 years old, as young as my little sister.
"It was seeing GOAL's creche for the children of sex workers that really stuck in my mind as a positive intervention. There, mothers who are forced to work can leave their kids in safety. The hope is that, through education, with a little help they may be able to break out of the cycle of poverty.
"I could feel that the kids there were automatically wary of me, of men, because of their own abusive experiences of men. We found that taking photos and showing them to the kids was a great way of breaking down the barriers, and once we did that we discovered that these were still just kids underneath it all - amazing kids.
"It was raining when we visited the slums, and we got a real sense of what life there is like. Water ran down the middle of the roads and bits of faeces floated on top. We saw a patch of ground with a goal at either end where the kids play soccer - it was pure muck. On our way back, it wasn't the kids who were playing there, it was the slum pigs who were digging through the dirt."
So, yes, Gordon D'Arcy has changed, and is it any wonder? It doesn't necessarily make him a better player - although he is looking terrific at present and will welcome the return of Brian O'Driscoll alongside him tomorrow - but it helps bring perspective to a strange 'sporting' life when in between looking at match videos, training memos and diet sheets at the Ireland camp this week there are regular e-mails from your new friends in Calcutta to enjoy and ponder on.
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