THE ink had barely dried on the scoreboard at Croke Park two Saturdays ago when the first of the Warren Gatland questions was fired at the Ireland coach Eddie O’Sullivan just minutes after an emphatic win over Scotland.

A five try performance from his team that afternoon, a result that has put them right back into the Six Nations title frame, should have been enough to dominate the traditional post match press conference deep in the bowels of the Hogan Stand.

Not this time. A fortnight before kick-off the hounds were already off the leash and blood was definitely in the air.

Asked if the presence of his former Irish mentor added a spice to the Celtic derby in the penultimate game of the 2008 RBS Six Nations season O’Sullivan played a straight bat borrowed from another sport.

“All you guys will be happy to talk about Warren coaching Wales and me coaching Ireland and I am sure I will be asked the question many times again before the game,” smiled Eddie before praising his alleged nemesis.

“Warren has got Wales on the right foot, they are moving forward again and we saw exactly what that means in 2005 when we went to Cardiff looking for the Triple Crown and they ended up winning the Grand Slam that day.

“You can see that Welsh team back on the pitch again, they have that same pep in their step, that same confidence and in fairness to Warren he has produced that quickly but this is our backyard and we are not going to give up anything very easily.”

Ireland against Wales is definitely the big game in Croker this weekend, a match when victory will hand the Triple Crown to the Welsh after their earlier successes against England and the Scots. The win will also keep the Welsh on target as the only team capable of winning the Grand Slam this season.

An Irish victory will throw an entirely different complexion on the RBS Championship year to date, seeing as how it protects O’Sullivan’s defense of the Triple Crown with England to come at Twickers on Saturday, March 15 and maintains his interest in the title race.

Mouth watering ingredients ahead of a key game you might think. The main ingredients even? No, not even a bit of it.

Ireland aren’t playing just Wales this weekend. This isn’t about 15 Irishmen against 15 Welshmen.

It’s about one man against another because come kick-off at lunchtime on Saturday Eddie O’Sullivan, the current Ireland coach, is playing Warren Gatland, the previous Ireland coach.

To quote the movie of the moment, There Will Be Blood. And Dublin 3 will be No Country for Old Men this Saturday either. Sorry.

The O’Sullivan-Gatland relationship throws down a spectacular backdrop to this game. And it is far from pretty despite their best efforts to camouflage their differences.

Eddie, you see, is blamed by many the rugby pundit as the man who sat in the background as Ireland number two as poor results and poorer performances helped to remove Gatland from office seven years ago.

The Gatland fans in the media here — and they are many — will tell you that their man was doomed from the moment O’Sullivan came in as his right hand man just over a year before the axe dropped on the Kiwi and he was replaced by ... O’Sullivan.

Yet when Gatland spoke to the Irish media at the launch of the Six Nations at the back end of January he didn’t appear to have a problem with his O’Sullivan past and the fact that he brought his eventual successor into the Ireland camp.

Asked if their relationship would act as a firecracker to this season’s game he said, “It’s a long time ago, it was seven years ago. I saw him today, shook his hand and asked how he’s getting on. People want to create something of a match-up that isn’t, but that’s part of the intrigue of the competition.”

By the weekend just gone, however, Gatland had changed his tune, telling one Sunday broadsheet of the advice that came his way when he first approached O’Sullivan back in 1999, less than two years before he was sacked.

“The IRFU said to me Eddie was available and it was completely my decision to appoint him,” said Gatland. “The number of people who said, ‘don’t touch him,’ ‘don’t go anywhere near him,’ ‘don’t touch him with a barge pole’ was huge.

“But you have to back your own judgment about people and their ability. I did that and sometimes in life you get burned. I have always tried to be true to myself and I don’t regret appointing him.”

Others see it differently, of course. O’Sullivan’s fan club, growing in numbers again after serious doubts were raised in France last autumn and rightly so, will tell you that Gatland was an accident waiting to happen after the 2001 championship, his last in charge of Ireland, even if he did beat Grand Slam-seeking England in his final game in charge.

The players, at least, are keeping their opinions quite close to their chest. Some of them are too young to even remember the Gatland-O’Sullivan axis, others don’t see it as relevant to Saturday’s game.

“I would say the whole thing about the coaches is a media thing really,” claimed Ulster and Ireland center Andrew Trimble. “It’s nothing that’s going to affect us.

“When we get on the pitch we’re not thinking, ‘I have to make this tackle because Warren Gatland is their coach.’ That’s certainly not the case.

“I’m aware of the circumstances of what happened between them but I’m not sure of the details. That’s between those two really and I’ve got nothing to do with it.”

Much as I admire Trimble’s honesty, I can’t help but feel he is a little naive in these circumstances. Ireland against Wales is going to be about O’Sullivan against Gatland, just as Wolves against Sunderland in the championship last season was about McCarthy versus Keane.

The fuse has been lit and it will be intriguing to see how it explodes at Croker on Saturday. Let the games begin.