Senior debut, a few hundred people from Cobh and elsewhere huddled in Virgin Media Park to primarily see him, one player of the match performance.

Welcome to the big time, Sean Edogbo.

Last season, I did a deep dive on Sean Edogbo as he was, at the time, a year-one academy player, and it was one of my most-viewed articles that year.

Just like his older brother Edwin, everyone can see Sean’s potential. It’s obvious. 6’5″. Well over 100kg. Explosive. Good in the air. Already on Ireland’s radar with the Emerging tour. As I said, it’s obvious.

If not for a nasty enough knee injury — that was fortunate not to be way worse — Sean Edogbo would have made his senior debut earlier this season. That’s straight from the mouth of Munster’s head coach, Clayton McMillan, on Thursday. It’s true. He was excellent during the preseason and picked up that knee injury right before Munster’s game against Edinburgh. He spent a few weeks out, but was back at it again pretty quickly, and has been in active contention for the last few weeks. Last Friday, he finally got his opportunity wearing #6 against the Dragons.

Straight away, it was very clear that he wasn’t out there to make friends.

I loved this bit early on. Makes a good shot on a guy already half in touch, and no chance he was going to have his opposite number use him to get back to his feet.

Get yourself up.

It’s always hard making your debut in a game like this. A rotten night, not much ball coming your way in the edge spaces — the #6 jersey in this system, much like the #7 — is an asymmetrical, rotating edge forward role that has you alternating between the 15m tramline and on looping lines inside, or as a ruck tracker across the field, depending on the context of the play.

The #6 role is also a primary lineout position, and Edogbo was hugely involved in that area as the game progressed.

In a game like this, with the weather expected, the “easier” position is probably how we use our #7 jersey. That role is somewhat less complex, has less positional context, and, at the lineout, it’s almost entirely used as the +1 or the “rip”. It’s not easy — by any means — just easier in context. It’s why Jack O’Donoghue, Tom Ahern and Tadhg Beirne have been used in that spot almost exclusively as the season has developed, so to see Sean Edogbo selected there was meaningful, even before the game.

In defence, it’s pretty complex too. You often start wide, but you have to track infield pretty quickly to cover the transit of the ball across the field, before filing out wide again on transition, depending on the side of the field you’re guarding.

You can see him filing infield from the wing at the start of this kick, only to show up centrally to make a big stop on Levi Douglas with Jean Kleyn later in the sequence.

Good stuff here too. He’s part of a double tackle, but the first big stop on Douglas is his — power, leg drive and stopping power.

On the next sequence, he had to track a transition ruck off a Mike Haley return, and he does a great job here of rejecting a counter-ruck after Barron slips off the man at pace.

He gets another really strong ruck entry a few minutes later off a central position, where he’d filed in off #10.

After that, he files out to the wing; exactly on system. A small thing, but important. That’s what the role says. Use centrally, offer on the edges when the play progresses opposite.

A few minutes later, when Dragons exited 80 odd metres down the field, Edogbo was the first man back offering an outlet for Shane Daly on transition, and he made two monster carries coming back infield. He dismisses the Dragons winger, before powering through Martinez and Ben Carter with really good fight in contact.

A few minutes later, he got on-ball again, this time on a tight progression after a maul break. Same thing; accelerates onto the ball, hits contact hard, powers through two forwards for a dominant carry and excellent gainline.

These are the kind of post-contact metres we’ve been badly needing this season, and especially here when the Dragons had done really well in stopping our flow on the second or third carry with their two-man stand-off stops.

He did it again, a few minutes later — three defenders off their feet.

And then again from close range.

We haven’t been getting that kind of offensive production from the #6 jersey all season on most of our close-range hit-ups off #9 post set piece. Sean Edogbo changed that immediately. He got through the defender every single time.

In the second half, Edogbo was used way more in the lineout, and he really showed up in an area where we’ve struggled this season — as a mobile pace jumper in the middle spaces.

The only other player who has thrived against contested lineouts like this has been Ahern. Beirne, in particular, has struggled to generate the pop into the air that Edogbo did here.

That’s natural, in a way. You wouldn’t expect Beirne to be as explosive as he was in his prime at 34 years of age and 17,000 minutes (estimated) in the last 12 months. Edogbo got into the air really quickly, from a static start — he didn’t have to run into the launch — and he was really easily lifted throughout. At the top of the jump, he showed excellent control and coordination under pressure and in difficult conditions.

He continued to influence the game through all 80 minutes in a way that belied the fact that this was his senior debut. Of course, he had one or two poor moments — this one in particular.

He did everything right. Got the loop timing on point, got into position and then blew the pass to Kilgallen.

If he got this moment back again, I think he drops the shoulder and attacks De Beer and Richards directly. And I don’t think they’d have been able to stop him, not easily anyway, but I get his thinking; Kilgallen was open, but the lines got crossed.

Before the game, I saw a few worries about his ruck work. Just like Edwin, he’s got really good decision-making when it comes to his entries. He had the pace to close the distance here and make sure the cleanout was on the threat, not on the bodies floating around in a cluttered contact.

Made the read, got in position, dominant clean out.

Watching it back, it struck me as an incredibly mature performance. First, the #6 jersey. It’s complicated in this system, and they usually put someone pretty experienced in it if at all possible, even in rotated teams. McMillan and Prendergast backed Sean Edogbo in what they knew would be a difficult game with the weather and the short week post-Castres.

It would have been easy to use him off the bench, but they knew what they saw, and they knew he could do it. And they were right; he played like a seasoned professional. If you’re looking for young players to put their hand up, Sean Edogbo did just that, and anyone who watches that game back will know that if he gets a chance against Glasgow, or Zebre, or in whatever game we have for the rest of the season, he can more than do a job.

He’s a young player, so, of course, there will be fluctuations and the mental and physical toll of doing 80 minutes in a game like this can sometimes only show up on the Sunday or Monday, but if you were looking for a bullet point list of what Sean Edogbo can do, what he might yet become, this was it.