Given a choice between a bandage or radical surgery, previously the Irish management have opted for the bandage. But yesterday they rolled the dice and applied the scalpel, making eight changes to the team which failed in Twickenham, and accordingly leaving only three of the team which failed in Lens.
The net result is a relative revolution, resulting in five new caps in the starting XV to play Scotland this Saturday in Lansdowne Road - Shane Horgan, on the wing, new half-backs in Ronan O'Gara and Peter Stringer, John Hayes at tight-head and Simon Easterby at blindside flanker.
Furthermore, Girvan Dempsey, Dennis Hickie and Mick Galwey return at full-back, wing, and lock, respectively. It's a young team (average age 25), with a couple of old heads, of which a good dozen could still be around for the next World Cup, albeit inexperienced and unproven but potentially exciting. It's a gamble too.
Ireland coach Warren Gatland and manager Donal Lenihan scarcely tried to conceal that their patience had worn out with most of the team which had played at Lens and Twickenham. Their hand was also forced by injuries to Bob Casey, Kevin Maggs and Justin Bishop, but in addition to the already excluded Conor O'Shea, Tom Tierney and Dion O'Cuinneagain, David Humphreys has been demoted to the bench and Paul Wallace to the A team. Lenihan admitted that the rash of penalties against Wallace was a primary factor.
Gatland commented: "I think it's pretty exciting. We were all disappointed with the performance last week and we've had a long chat about it, and we felt that there's a good injection of some youth and some enthusiasm, and five of the Munster pack that have performed particularly well this year. We've also tried to stick with some combinations of guys that have played together."
Indeed, Hayes will have the comfort of three experienced fellow Munster men in the tight five, and aside from being team-mates, Peter Stringer and Ronan O'Gara will also have the assistance of fellow Munster men Anthony Foley in front of them at number eight as well as Mike Mullins outside them.
That means there are eight of the Munster team, and with Horgan surrounded by Dempsey, Hickie and Brian O'Driscoll, in effect this is virtually a composite Munster/Leinster selection in the areas those two teams are strongest. The other two are Easterby and Dawson, remarkably leaving no current Ulster player in the team, although they can rightly have claims on Dawson, not to mention Humphreys and Justin Fitzpatrick on the bench.
Whatever about the political correctness of all that, the emergence of Hayes, from Cappamore and brought into the game via Bruff, and Horgan, a Drogheda-reared product of Boyne, alongside Galwey of Currow and Trevor Brennan of Barnhall, continues the alternative route of junior/youths rugby also taken by Tierney. At last Irish rugby is starting to broaden its base from the narrow confines of the schools' game.
All in all, it's a statistician's delight. The quartet of Shannon men constitutes a club record. It's the first time uncapped halves have made debuts together since Niall Hogan and Paul Burke played against England in '95. Stringer is Ireland's 13th scrum-half in a decade.
If Guy Easterby joins Simon Easterby on the pitch, it will be the first time brothers have made debuts together since Mick and Jack Ryan played against England in 1887. Team-mates of Eamon de Velera at Rockwell, Mick later owned the 100 to 1 Grand National winner of 1928, Tipperary Star. Continuing the racing connection, the Easterby brothers are cousins of the Easterby trainers in England. None of this stuff is made up.
Unveiling five new caps at a stroke doesn't quite compare with the nine who took the field in Twickenham in 1961 (and lost 16-0), but surprisingly enough such revolutions in Irish rugby are common enough.
There have been mixed results, such as when Brian Ashton unveiled five new caps (Kevin Nowlan, John McWeeney, Conor McGuinness, Malcolm O'Kelly and Kieron Dawson) against the All Blacks in 1997 (augmented by two more from the bench in Kevin Maggs and David Erskine) and lost 63-15.
But the infusion of six newcomers in 1991 against France - Simon Geoghegan, Rob Saunders, Brian Robinson, Gordon Hamilton, Galwey and Brian Rigney - provided a springboard for the relatively successful 1991 World Cup and the campaigns of '93 and '94.
Similarly, following the whitewash of '84, Mick Doyle's radical crop of November '84, which held Mark Ella's vintage grand slammers to 16-9 at Lansdowne Road, launched the careers of Brendan Mullin, Michael Bradley, Willie Anderson and Philip Matthews - Willie Sexton was also capped the same day - not to mention the 1985 Triple Crown and Championship-winning season.
Clearly a similar resurgence would be asking for too much, and shows how much time this team will need, especially with a rather untried back division. Necessity being the mother of invention in the light of a spate of injured wingers, Horgan has been pressed into service there.
Mullins is suddenly the grand old man of a youthful back division, in which the second oldest members are the 24-year-old pair of Dempsey and Hickie; the other four being 22 or under.
There must also be question marks about Hayes' scrummaging at this level, and the balance of the back-row, although this seems to have been improved with the greater graft of Easterby. Overall though, as Gatland said, this Irish team needed the stimulus of new blood.
Of course, there's also a tacit admission of selectorial mistakes for Twickenham though "putting in new caps in Twickenham was always going to be difficult," maintained Lenihan.
Ironically, the A team selection seems more conservative, where Eric Elwood, Paddy Johns, Paul Wallace and O'Cuinneagain provide four of the six changes to the developmental team, the others being Sheldon Coulter and Tierney.
