While you have to go back to the summer of 2018 for the last meeting of Ireland and the Wallabies, the four-and-a-half year gap between games would have been cut in two if not for Covid-19.Andy Farrell had been set to travel Down Under in the summer of 2020 for what would have been his first tour since becoming head coach, but the pandemic saw to it that the two-Test series was scrapped.Jamison Gibson-Park is now the established first-choice scrum-half for Ireland, but it's unlikely he'd even have been in the squad had that tour gone ahead as planned.Irish-qualified since 2019, the Kiwi seemed to be well down the pecking order of scrum-halves at the time.
Firmly second-choice at Leinster behind Luke McGrath, his provincial team-mate had been part of the Ireland squad in the opening rounds of the Six Nations, but it was Conor Murray who started all three of those games, supplemented by Ulster's John Cooney off the bench.Since the pandemic hiatus, Ireland's depth chart at 9 has changed dramatically.While Cooney and McGrath have both been involved in Irish squads, neither have been able to earn a cap since 2020, with Cooney now reportedly being eyed-up by Scotland coach Gregor Townsend next year, when he hits the three-year stand-down period to switch international allegiance.At 28, Gibson-Park was relatively old for a Test debutant when he first pulled on the green jersey for Ireland against Italy in October 2020, but he's set to win his 23rd cap this evening against Australia as a key member of the world's number one ranked side.And he admits the Covid-enforced break of 2020 gave him cause for reflection on where his career was headed."I suppose so, just like whether I was going to give it a crack or not," he says."It's