Irish ills won't be fixed by sackings

Although it briefly seemed as if Warren Gatland and his Irish management team might be caught in the eye of a post-Lens storm, the signs are that it will blow away relatively calmly. After a few days of navel contemplation, the dawning of a new week has brought with it a realisation inside the IRFU and Irish rugby that sacking the coach will not be the panacea for all ills any more than it has been in the past.

Gatland, Donal Lenihan and the departing assistant coach Philip Danaher, who had decided to stand down before the World Cup, will meet with a select sub-committee of the union in Dublin this evening.

The dismay over Ireland's relatively limp World Cup exit at the hands of Argentina is likely to be expressed in full, but that's probably as far as it will go. Indeed, the feeling seems to be that the IRFU will not even bother issuing a formal statement to confirm that Gatland will at least see out his two-and-a-bit year contract until the end of the Six Nations.

If so, then Gatland himself, along with Lenihan and whoever is recruited as a backs/assistant coach, have some hard decisions to make on the shape the team now starts to take. It surely will be the time to bring in a few new players, the likes of Girvan Dempsey, Gordon D'Arcy, Shane Horgan and maybe others.

There will be the remainder of the interprovincials, starting this weekend, and the start of the European Cup in three weeks' time to decipher information, interspersed with national squad sessions before Ireland start their Six Nations campaign early next year.

Perhaps, with hindsight, there was a degree of excessive expectations which we in the media were partly responsible for. If so, mea culpa. Then again, at the risk of being hoist by their own petard, the management and players had boldly stated they wanted to go where no Irish team in the World Cup before them had gone, namely by reaching the semi-finals (not departing before the quarters). Then again, if they hadn't, they'd have been accused of lacking ambition.

Gatland has also been accused of being too loyal to some players, even if in fact there's been a fair degree of turnover within the squad in the last 18 months. Here again, the flip side of that coin is that if Gatland had dropped every player who had a bad game or two (as has been the Irish custom for much of the preceding years) he'd have been accused of chopping and changing too much, and not engendering a settled team. As the current Irish coach has no doubt discovered, like his predecessors, you can't win.

It is true that the current management helped to generate one of the more settled teams of recent times, in the process fostering a camaraderie within the squad and at the same time reducing the fear of making a mistake which so often plagues Irish players.

It is also true that the players were afforded every comfort, that all the benefits of professionalism were placed at the players' disposal. Whether this created a comfort zone of sorts is a moot point. Surely every professional squad in the World Cup were afforded similar five-star hotels and given five-star treatment?

One of the first instances of the "comfort zone" coming into the Irish rugby lexicon came via Mike Brewer, in his time as back-up coach to Murray Kidd, when he made his infamous observation about Eddie Halvey. The one thing this management team have done, more than any other one, is hammer home the message that failure to comply with Craig White's fitness standards just wouldn't cut the mustard.

Undoubtedly, Ireland's technical shortcomings and substandard skill levels were the most worrying aspect of their exit last week, especially compared to those of their conquerors. Compared with the likes of Agustin Pichot, Lisandro Arbizu and Diego Albanese, not to mention some of the forwards, Ireland don't have a high level of handling skills and vision.

And whatever about their technical shortcomings, or the limitations of certain players in certain positions, arguably the biggest lesson to be learnt from Ireland's failure to beat Argentina is that basically Irish players aren't mentally tough enough. After all, this is far from the first time that Ireland have buckled under pressure. No doubt all of this is in some way connected. At its heart, international rugby, like any other team sport, is essentially a numbers game. Those with the biggest numbers generally do best. Might is right.

IRISH rugby has, and probably always will be, a poor third in national importance to soccer and Gaelic football as a major team sport. A personal viewpoint of mine - and I know it might sound a bit simplistic and that I've been here before - is that the over-hyped schools' game has been Irish rugby's salvation but also part of the problem.

Not alone is it an elitist fall-back which fails to significantly broaden the net, it's the nature of win-at-all-costs, knockout Cup rugby. But it generates income and newspaper readers, all of which combines to make it an increasingly bigger monster. It should be more of a league format, however much that diminishes its immediate attraction; kicking should be banned from outside the 22 and anything to encourage improved skills and running rugby ought to be brought on board.

Meanwhile, the IRFU's increased emphasis on under-age rugby within the clubs - where Irish rugby can bypass the rigidity and tradition of schools' sports - should be intensified even further.

At the higher end of the spectrum, Ireland's problems are a manifestation of Europe's as a whole. Look at England in Paris on Sunday, the flat-track bullies capsizing again when under the kosh. So much for the Allied Dunbar again.

So, after a dozen years of playing World Cups, and after four years of professionalism, and despite home advantage and favourable climatic conditions, the Northern Hemisphere has collectively had its worst World Cup based purely on the semi-final line-up. Never before have three Southern Hemisphere sides been in the semi-finals at the same time, and never before has not one of the home unions failed to at least make the last four.

It doesn't require a rocket scientist to deduce that the Southern Hemisphere's international players benefit from the Super 12. Europe needs a similar, three-month long professional tournament. But there are too many hostages to tradition in European rugby, namely the self-interest of the over-broad club systems, which the English club owners and Twickenham have confounded in recent years. It is, therefore, unlikely to happen.