Irish creep in under cover of anonymity

IT WAS somehow appropriate that the 32-man Irish squad, complete with backroom team of eight and media corps of two, arrived in Auckland almost unnoticed at the crack of dawn on Saturday and immediately sneaked stealthily away on a scenic 100-mile plus journey north to the outpost of Whangerei. This Irish Development squad has had the profile of limbo dancers. Which is just fine.

In these parts, it was the final weekend of the regular league campaign in the Super-12 series, the tri-nations provincial tournament which grows more popular with each passing year. Next weekend comes the semi-finals, with the holders Auckland, where the Irish squad will then be based entertaining Natal. Imagine the All-Ireland and multiply.

As for the 35-40,000 inhabitants of Whangerei (pronounced with a hard G, as `Fan-ger-ae'), all bar a dozen of whom seem to be hiding underground, they've hardly cast a glance. Even Noreen from Mayo, working across the narrow Hatea River from the Quality Hotel, the squad's base didn't know of her compatriots impending arrival until Friday.

The yachts on the river sit silently, no longer inhabited by the Americans, Canadians and Australians who were here up until the summer season ended suddenly six weeks ago. It's autumn now, but the temperatures remain a pleasant 19 degrees celsius. There's been scarcely a breeze or trickle of rain.

The timing, therefore, is pretty much perfect. This is the kind of development tour which the Scots for one, have made in to a fine art. Out of season and out of sight if not entirely out of mind, they bring together an unlikely assortment of players; head far away to play against non-mainstream opposition and maximise their limited resources.

Out of sight, and out of mind in some ways as well. Coach Brian Ashton is utilising this tour to rid the Irish team of some of the mental baggage that comes with Northern Hemisphere rugby.

This is far more of a beginning to the Ashton era than the Five Nations programme he inherited at short notice. "Up to now, I feel as if I have been holding somebody else's baby."

With 21 uncapped players in an imaginative if slightly risky selection, these are very much Brian's Babes and he intends making the most of the opportunity which this tour provides.

While reluctant to start shouting from the rooftops before a ball is kicked (or, more pertinently, passed) competitively, or to start promising a golden new era of 15-man Irish rugby, Ashton says that the priority of this tour is to develop a new game, and by extension new players.

"First of all we've got to try and identify a game which is an Irish game that both I and the players are comfortable with. It'll probably be a game that they've not had a great deal of experience of, wherever they've played. It's a more dynamic game, it's a more challenging game. It's a game where players are given responsibility for making decisions. It's really getting away from the Northern Hemisphere, set-piece game.

"Secondly, and obviously from an individual point of view, for the players it's a massive opportunity to make their mark in our minds in terms of their contribution to Irish rugby in the short-term, medium term and long-term," Ashton added, with the 1999 World Cup very much in mind.

There really isn't much more time for all-out `development' tours and the widespread blooding of young players. The squad's manager Pat Whelan acknowledged that at the time of the previous development tour to Australia, four years ago, the IRFU had planned to alternate developmental tours every second year with full tours.

"As it happens, this tour comes at a very opportune time for us," says Whelan. "Brian has just come into the situation and he now has the opportunity to develop the players to the type of game that he wants to play. For the tour to South Africa next year we should be a lot further advanced than we are now. It will be a full tour."

The opposition has also been carefully picked. Realistically, this inexperienced squad would not be ready for first division Kiwi provincial sides. Thus the five games against New Zealand teams before the finale against Western Samoa incorporate encounters against leading division two sides Northland, Bay of Plenty and King Country, as well as the New Zealand Academy and New Zealand Maori composite sides.

Even that lot could prove daunting.

"In the meantime we've lost a certain amount of our quality players (there have been six withdrawals), but also most of the opposition seem to have improved fairly dramatically," said Whelan yesterday.

Northland have won their opening three games of the season, running up 143 points in their last two outings, while all bar three of a strong-looking, 24-man Academy squad are Super 12 players, and they will be captained by All Black winger Jeff Wilson.

"There isn't any doubt about it, the games the players are going to experience over here are something they won't have experienced in the Northern Hemisphere. The players, coaches and administrators, and the whole world of rugby here, have a far more open-minded approach than they have in the Northern Hemisphere. That's just a fact of life," says Ashton.

"The game we're trying to play imposes massive demands on players, individually, but also gives them far more opportunity to be self-expressive and creative, without losing sight of the paramount importance of discipline in everything they do on the field."

Only with Brive and a free-spirited French team did the European Cup or Five Nations Championship rival the Super 12 for sheer pace, continuity and attacking, 15-man rugby. The recent English Cup final underlined the reluctance in the Northern Hemisphere to make mistakes.

Ashton sees the problems of allowing the players too much latitude. "It bothers me if they make the same mistake twice in the game, or in successive games," he says, "but you only progress by experimenting. If we cut out any freedom from the players' game, we're not going to go anywhere. We'll either go sideways or backwards. We've got to expect that there will be players who will make mistakes."

All the more so as this is very much a getting-to-know you tour, as much so for the players given the curious mix of home-grown, ex-pat and `recently acquired' players within the squad.

Accordingly, the first training session was of mixed quality. Spilled balls and the sight of the culprit doing 10 sit-ups have been common enough. But the players were discernibly responsive and the spirit is far from jaded.

After an arduous 26 1/2-hour journey, encompassing a two-hour pit-stop in Los Angeles in a glorified telephone kiosk (no smoking, of course), never mind the unprecedented demands of this never-ending season, the players probably needed a training spin like a hole in the head.

But after a bite to eat and a shower on arrival, that's what the Irish management ordered - a 90-minute training spin followed by a weights session. Yesterday afternoon's two-hour stint followed along similar lines, lots of confined drills, with the emphasis on continuity and ball retention in contact, culminating in separate line-out work amongst the forwards and back moves involving some of the back-row men. The session even concluded with ripples of applause.

Conducted nearby in the Kamo rugby club, there's hardly been a passer-by. Of the two or three interested ones, inquiries went along the lines of "who are these guys?"

In a sense, that's what Ashton and co are trying to figure out as well.