My Life in Rugby with Rob Saunders: The former Ireland and London Irish scrum-half talks about his life in the game

Captaining and representing Ireland from 1990-94 was a huge honour and something only a small percentage of people get to do in their lives. It was great but it was a fairly dismal period for Irish rugby, we didn’t win an awful lot. From a lot of players’ point of view, playing for Ireland was the major prize.

Ireland won the Triple Crown in 1984 but after that we had underperformed considerably. As much as we’d liked to have competed for titles we knew deep down that we didn’...