While their New Year’s Day showdown with Ulster at Kingspan Stadium is set to go ahead as it stands, senior coach Stuart Lancaster was leading team training today due to the fact Cullen won’t be out of self-isolation until later in the week.

“We’ve had a number of players and staff, myself included, who’ve picked up Omicron and have had different periods of isolation. I don’t want to trivialise this in any way, but from my own personal experience I was okay. Very, very mild symptoms. To the point where, only the fact we were testing, I probably wouldn’t have really known,” Cullen explained in a media call earlier today.

“It has placed challenges. More for people around family and what you can do in terms of decision making. My wife and children headed down the country separate to me and they were isolating. They’ve tested and they’ve thankfully been negative. I’ve been isolating from them over the last few days.”

Although there was an element of frustration over their festive visit to Munster being postponed for a second successive year, this is a decision Cullen had been anticipating given how prevalent the virus is in Ireland.

“With the social gatherings that take place for most people on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, that game for me was always going to be a huge challenge. Because of the amount of contacts. Even now we’ve guys that are being pinged as close contacts to various different people,” Cullen added.

“When those take place and you’re alerted, it’s not even just yourself, but it’s also all the people you’ve been in contact with. For me that game was always going to be quite tricky.”