When Ireland head coach Andy Farrell named his squad for the Autumn Nations Series, as well as this week's Ireland A game against a New Zealand select XV, it came as a surprise to many that Connacht's Gavin Thornbury wasn't among the 49 players involved.
The second row has been teased with international call-ups before; Joe Schmidt was a fan of his, and brought him to a 2018 camp, although injury meant he couldn't take part, while a shoulder injury meant he wasn't considered for selection in the summer of 2021, when he was coming off the back of a stand-out season with Connacht.
That shoulder surgery led to him missing the bulk of last season, but the 29-year-old appears to be back on an upward trajectory, starting the season well for Connacht, who have battled back from a poor start in the URC to pick up back-to-back wins before the international break.
As is so often the case in rugby, one player's injury frustration will open the door for another, and after Munster's Thomas Ahern was ruled out of the Ireland A squad due to a shoulder issue of his own, it was Thornbury who got the call.
And the 6ft 8in lock has been thrown straight into the action, named alongside Joe McCarthy in the second row for tomorrow's A game at the RDS.
"It's exciting. I’m just really looking forward to Friday now," he says.
"I was really excited when I got the news that I was coming into camp and then to get the start is building on that again.
"For the week that's in it, we’re getting ready to play the All Blacks [New Zealand XV] and the other lads are playing South Africa so it’s an incredible week to be involved and to see how everything is run. It’s just been a really good experience for me."
In a nice twist of fate, Thornbury's (above) first experience with an Ireland squad comes against New Zealand, who he credits with making him the player he is today.
Having come through the Leinster academy, the Dublin native packed his bags and moved there for six months in 2016 after a call from his former Leinster coach Kurt McQuilkin.
Playing club rugby for the Waverley-based Border Rugby Club, and then provincially for Wanganui, the ultimate goal was getting some gametime under his belt following a long injury layoff.
"I feel like it has come around full circle to be playing against them.
"It was a massive part of my journey. I loved my time in New Zealand. It was probably one of the highlights of my life, those six months. They really stood to me and I really enjoyed them.
"I went down there in May and I had just come off a six-month injury so instead of going into a summer and not play for four months before going into a new season I had the opportunity to go down there.
"It kind of opened up my eyes to everything, life really. It was an incredible experience for me and kind of made me who I am today to be honest."
"It was a chance to play straight away. That’s what I wanted to do and playing in New Zealand is something not many Irish players get the chance to do, to go and actually experience it was really, really good. It was one of the highlights of my life to be honest."
And having gone straight from school through to the Leinster academy system and college at UCD, he says his time in New Zealand developed him as much off the pitch as it did on it.
"It was completely different. I had come from Dublin, I was very much a city-head and you're going to a place where a lot of the players you’re playing with are farmers, sheep farming. It certainly opened up the eyes.
"I went into working pretty much full-time. I worked as a roofer for three-and-a-half months and then in a meat works for six weeks. It was something I had never done and was completely outside of my comfort zone.
"I hadn’t done the whole work thing. Rugby was probably only the side part of it. I’d never done that and it was a really good experience for me.
"It kind of opened up my eyes to everything, life really. It was an incredible experience for me and kind of made me who I am today to be honest.
"I think I played 23 games in 21 weeks or something like that, so it was just nice to get that game time under the belt. You learn how to play that many games in that short a space of time. That was really good for me.
"Then it was a completely different way of playing. You're playing with Fijians, Samoans, there’s such a mixed bag of people down there. They’d throw massive offloads.
"It’s just a different way of playing and you’re dealing with some massive characters. That’s probably the biggest thing that I loved doing, it wasn’t very structured, if you saw something was on, you called it, you played it. They tried pretty much everything down there. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.
"It was just completely different to what I had played since I had started in school."
With a World Cup just around the corner, Thornbury will need the season of his life to leapfrog some names in the queue for Andy Farrell's 33-man squad.
It starts tomorrow at the RDS, but he says after enduring such a difficult time in the last 18 months, he just wants to soak up the moment for now.
"It’s just nice to be on the pitch and having minutes and even being able to consistently train. It’s refreshing for me because I spent so long out last year and it was a pretty dark time for me.
"To be here now is really refreshing for me."
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