Johnny Watterson: Beating South Africa would show Ireland’s comfort in top dog status

Irish coach Andy Farrell sits up in front of the lockers in the converted changing room in the Sport Ireland Campus in Abbottstown, a nest of cameras pointing his way.

To one side a door opens into a vast indoor pitch, a far cry from the sepia-tinged make-do Irish teams of old practising last ditch lineouts in the ballroom of the Shelbourne Hotel before a match because of the gale blowing and waterlogged pitches.

Behind Farrell are rows of smart blue doors with the keys in the locks and over to one side off the main room the sound of a toilet loudly flushing and a door slamming. Unisex cubicles, rugby has come a long way.

Just 11 days out from Ireland’s first match of their November series against the current world champions South Africa and the location, the mood, the expectations, the attitudes and temporarily, the sounds have changed.

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From the sprawling hectares of Irish Rugby’s High Performance, down towards the Aquatic Centre, the women’s Irish hockey team are breaking for lunch. Around the corner, GAA pitches and football pitches, real and synthetic and the halls where the Irish boxing team have gilded their rings with gold, reach out across the campus and touch each other.

The geography and sober architecture are bespoke and contemporary. There is excellence around the place that gives agency. Farrell has that agency.

Farrell’s more enthusiastic welcoming of the ranking is a different tack and equally a high-wire act as backing up the thrilling New Zealand series by beating the world champions has never seemed more important.

On his makeshift stage, his aura is pragmatic and with no sense of warily stepping back from the Springboks. There is no “knowing Ireland’s place”. His words and those of openside flanker Josh van der Flier, who follows, are a blend of confidence and understated defiance, his overall mood a comfortable accommodation of Ireland’s world number one ranking.

“I don’t mind being number one. We should embrace it. What are we waiting for? Let’s go after it full throttle and see where we’re at,” says Farrell. “It’s definitely something we’re pleased to have,” adds van der Flier. “Definitely now we’re trying to attack it as kind of an underdog mentality with nothing to lose. We’re going to attack the games, attack the World Cup.”

There is a resonance to the World Cup-winning team facing the number one ranked team in the world, a kind of stellar alignment that does not frequently occur.

But there is also an important question Ireland might ask itself. Whether the team are truly comfortable residents of the world number one position, or squatters on the property for a limited time waiting for the rightful owners to deploy and reoccupy.

Farrell trawls through the list of injuries and could make a case for the MIAs being too great a burden. Hugo Keenan may play, James Lowe will not. Van der Flier may play, Tadhg Furlong and Jamison Gibson Park may not. And Jacob Stockdale, who knows? Then there’s the, to be managed, plane load of sick Ulster players returning from South Africa.

But Farrell doesn’t make the case. As defensive coach in 2019, he saw at close quarters how Joe Schmidt and Ireland entered that year’s Rugby World Cup as the top-ranked side, the strategy to downplay Ireland’s status not embrace it.

Farrell’s more enthusiastic welcoming of the ranking is a different tack and equally a high-wire act as backing up the thrilling New Zealand series by beating the world champions has never seemed more important.

Just shy of a year away from Paris 2023, victory, no matter how it needs to come, should be Ireland’s imperative. Beating South Africa is the only real build-on from the All Blacks. How else to measure Ireland’s maturity?

Winning seems more important now than process, method, culture. Winning will reinforce what took place in New Zealand and instil in the players that the act of success is learned, is an aptitude that when repeated comes easier with time.

Habitual winning is doing things right almost always, or as Farrell puts it playing with accuracy, discipline and patience. Winning is not a concept, a notion or a conceit but a combination of tangible things, self-esteem, confidence and disciplined strategic thinking.

“We know they want to use their defence as an attacking weapon. We know that they are very, very good at getting out of their own half. They manage the middle third well. And 100 per cent a point of difference for them is the maul,” says Farrell. “And plus, they’re very good on the counter-attack and their high ball stuff is very good.”

He says that, not as a prematch defence posture in case of defeat, but as a pragmatist facing real issues.

The more players win, the more their brains carve out new neural pathways in a bid to recapture the positive emotions. The Irish players challenge is whether they have learned to fire up on demand, not against just anybody but the three-time World Cup winners.

This time out defeat might seem like more than a bloody nose and maybe Ireland need to engage their inner prize fighter. For spirit and plausible continuity, sometimes winning is everything.