Quantity has to be sacrificed for quality. An eight-month domestic season of 35 matches sounds reasonable. It is hard work and I accept that playing when you are tired or with niggling injuries is part of professional sport.
I have always prided myself on playing in teams where you just get on with it without looking for excuses about being tired. But it is in nobody's interests if O'Driscoll is knackered in four years when the sport needs him to be playing fantastic rugby so all the kids will want to be like him.
The five-week suspension I had in the middle of the season has turned out to be a blessing, allowing me a break and giving a young player like Lewis Deacon the chance to show what he could do in my place for Leicester.
It was good for me because I had played my first match of the season way back on August 14, Cardiff away.
I would never have thought then that it would build into such a fantastic climax - a third-Test decider against Australia.
We are confident that we can win it, that we have players who can break the defensive line. Indeed, we have already scored five tries against a team that conceded only one throughout the last World Cup.
Tomorrow we have another potential game-breaker making his full Test debut, Austin Healey.
Dafydd James took his try well in the first Test and has not let us down in any way but Austin gives us a little more invention with his ability to come off his wing into the role of first or second receiver.
Austin has been one of the outstanding players of the tour and the fact that he happens to be my club- mate at Leicester is irrelevant.
He is fully worth his place in the Test side. I have known him for five years now - but it seems like 50! You have to take him for what he is, a funny character, even if it means a load of earache in training. I give him his weekly throttling just to make sure he stays in line (only joking).
We talked about playing him in Melbourne last week before he was declared unfit and Austin knows as well as anybody that when we get our chances tomorrow, we must make them count.
So, like all the best dramas, it's come down to the final act. The tour ends tomorrow and you don't want to leave Australia, of all places, as losers.
