Physical chasm a cause for concern

Gerry Thornley On Rugby:Hasn't it been extraordinary how the fizz just went out of Irish rugby so suddenly this season? A salient warning, perhaps, as to what the future might hold.

There's still plenty around to fill the Heineken European Cup post quarter-final void; be it the climax to the Magners Celtic League, the AIB League or, with that warning in mind, the recently completed IRB Under-19 World Championship in Ulster.

By being on our own doorstep, the tournament has at least sparked some debate which, you hope, has reached 62 Lansdowne Road and beyond. Ireland weren't alone in struggling against the southern hemisphere "Big Three", whose only defeat in 11 matches against other teams was France's 17-8 win over South Africa, and much of the debate has centred on that physical chasm.

Yet as striking was the gulf in skills. Ireland did not lack for possession against Australia, indeed the Baby Blacks were smaller than the gargantuan Baby Boks but destroyed them in the final with their handling skills, awareness, pace and eye for the tryline.

Charlie McAleese, the coach of the Ireland Under-19s, isn't the first under-age coach to feel utter frustration with a system in which the fiefdom that is the schools' lobby enjoys near untouchable status within the Irish under-age structure. As he told this newspaper on Saturday, "the be-all and end-all of protecting and ring-fencing the schools cup just does not prepare players to improve as quickly as we need them to improve in terms of conditioning, skills and game appreciation."

By far the least relevant under-age results, especially in the longer term, are those achieved by the Irish Schools and a far more meaningful yardstick has been the annual Under-19 tournament. There must also be many a club coach, from mini-rugby up, or provincial coach who winces every time he is reminded that supposedly around 85 per cent of Irish internationals are produced by the schools. No, they happen to pass through the schools, understandably if you think of the sport's socio-economic base, and that they ultimately become internationals can be as much in spite of, rather than because of, the schools.

There are many pluses to the schools game generally and their parochial, provincial competitions, such as the health, discipline and camaraderie it produces, but the emphasis (unique in global rugby) on knock-out cups is not conducive to either coaches or players developing skills.

Introducing qualifying leagues for the cups has only heightened the need for winning from September or October onwards. By right there should be no junior cup at all, with leagues, encompassing a points system to encourage try-scoring, running all the way through to - for the sake of tradition - one senior cup.

It is also a nonsense that the IRFU schools committee selects coaches for the Irish schools side. Not alone is this dangerously political, it has also seen the committee go outside the union's own accredited coaches. Furthermore, at least three of the leading rugby schools in Leinster are employing coaches from outside the IRFU's coaching system.

Increasingly, schools coaches are being paid and risk dismissal unless they deliver trophies.

Ironically, though the schools retain first call on players over clubs, even those clubs who introduced the player to the game, the IRFU are far more effective in ensuring the clubs use union-accredited coaches than the schools. Go figure.

It surely is no co-incidence that the best under-age performance of any Irish side in recent years - the recent Under-20 Grand Slam - followed nine months of conditioning and training for the majority of those players in the provincial academies, mostly Leinster's under Colin McEntee. The under-20s were also coached by Eric Elwood and Dan McFarland - IRFU-accredited coaches.

In the Under-19 World Championship the way the Welsh team sought to keep the ball alive and attack space bore echoes of, say, Mike Ruddock and Scott Johnson's Welsh Grand Slam team of two long years ago or the current Llanelli Scarlets. In number eight Sam Warburton and halfbacks Rhys Webb and Gareth Owen and others, they look to have some true stars of the future.

None of this is a coincidence. "This is an issue we addressed a number of years ago," admitted the Welsh CEO Roger Lewis yesterday. "We have established very good relationships with schools. We identify elite players in the schools from beyond 16, have complete access to them and introduce them to the regional academies."

"Critically, the four academies and their coaches are all employed by the Welsh RFU," adds Lewis. "Our under-19s under Justin Burnell play a style of game that we've adopted in Wales, which is an expansive, high tempo ball in hand game and each players' progress is monitored centrally by our High Performance Unit."

To that end, the Welsh HPU met yesterday and have identified five players in their under-19 squad they believe can progress to the top of the game, which would be a good return and is the true measure of success at this level.

Unless the schools game here starts adhering to the union's own long-term playing model, and begins employing IRFU-accredited coaches within the provincial set-ups and changes its competitive structures, then it will behove someone or people with vision in the IRFU to follow the example of the Welsh.

The priority of the schools game should not be whether boys from under-14 up wins trophies, or how much money it makes, how many Triple Crowns Irish schools sides win or how many adults bask in the glow of these victories, but instead how many continue playing the game and how their talent has been maximised.

As things stand, in one of the supreme ironies, it seems the schools game is now being run more for the benefit of adults than the participants.