In sport, every forecast is perishable. All of the great pundits change their minds like a slot machine. So, is the Irish rugby team at the end of something old or at the start of something new? Are we still thinking more about the last World Cup than the next one? Are we stuck? Put your coins in the slot and pull the lever.
On Saturday in Chicago, New Zealand will bring some clarity to where we stand, as they have done so vividly and viciously in the past. Before the breakthrough game in Soldier Field nine years ago, Ireland’s average margin of defeat against the All-Blacks since the turn of the century had been 21 points from 14 meetings.
In those 15 years, Ireland had beaten every other tier-one Test nation but whatever empirical gains we made, however many times we beat England or France or Australia or South Africa, our performances against New Zealand established our limit.
In Andy Farrell’s newly released autobiography, the chapter about Ireland’s win over the All Blacks in Chicago nine years ago is titled The Shift. New Zealand were on a record winning streak of 18 matches and Farrell wonders if “subconsciously, they [New Zealand] were not quite as focused on the job as they usually would be. Perhaps in the back of their minds they were thinking, ‘We’ll beat Ireland. That’s what we do.’”
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But they must have always thought that. Had it ever made any difference to the outcome before?
That was the day when Ireland entered New Zealand’s peer group. In 10 Test matches since then the score is tied at five apiece. But what does that mean for us? How do we stay there?
In the history of the All Blacks, their greatest superpower has been renewal. Great players came and went without New Zealand ever relinquishing their position among the top two or three teams in the world. Usually the top team. Everybody took it for granted. They had periods of rebuilding like everybody else, but it didn’t come with any permission to lose or slip.
Ireland are in that place now. If the squad that went to the last World Cup was arguably the deepest and most talented in our history, how do we get to the next World Cup in a similar position?
The average age of the Irish squad at the 2023 World Cup was 29, which was just a year older than Ireland’s average age at the previous two World Cups. But the average age of the match-day squad for the quarter-final against New Zealand was more than 30. There were 14 thirtysomethings in green that evening, nine of whom started the match.
The significance of that defeat for that group was not lost on anybody at the time. The postmatch scene in the Irish dressingroom that Conor Murray describes in his new autobiography reeks with finality.
“I’ve never seen an Irish dressingroom as devastated,” he writes. “The numbness in there is sick. The silence, the pall of gloom, the awful silence, the shell-shocked numbness, the haunting silence. It was like we were all suffering this stunned reaction to news of a sudden death and we don’t know what to do or what to say because we just can’t take it in.”
Johnny Sexton and Keith Earls – who had played earlier in the tournament – both retired that night and they have since been joined by Peter O’Mahony and Murray. The intellectual capital that has left the group since the last World Cup has been enormous.
And yet, the guts of the team that lined up that night will form the spine of the team that starts in Chicago on Saturday. By the next World Cup, Tadhg Beirne, Jamison Gibson-Park, Bundee Aki, James Lowe and Jack Conan will be 35; Tadhg Furlong and Josh van der Flier will be 34; Gary Ringrose will be 32; Andrew Porter and Hugo Keenan, 31.
When all those players are fit it is hard to imagine an Ireland Test team right now without most of them in it. But at what stage does Farrell start gambling on the future and start blooding players he may need in two years’ time? Is this week too soon? Or does the material exist to build a team that can contend at the next World Cup?
When he took over from Joe Schmidt after the 2019 World Cup, the team needed to be refreshed too, but Farrell had a full World Cup cycle in which to do that. In his first Six Nations game in charge, for example, he gave debuts to Caelan Doris and Rónan Kelleher. He knew for sure they would be with him in France three years later.
Farrell had some time and space in which to try stuff. In his first two seasons in charge he delivered a win rate of 64 per cent, which would have been more than acceptable at most other times in Ireland’s history. But Schmidt had managed 78 per cent in his first two seasons, and Declan Kidney had reached 81 per cent. Farrell, though, had enough latitude to absorb some poor results while he was reshaping the team, and that license also exists now.
For all his qualities as a strategist and a man manager, Farrell has always been regarded as a terrific selector too. In that context he hasn’t been afraid to make big calls. When Doris was picked for the first time, O’Mahony was left out; when Joe McCarthy made his debut against France in Marseilles, James Ryan was omitted.
These are the kind of calls that are facing him in the coming season. Ireland cannot go to the next World Cup with the side that starts against New Zealand on Saturday. How good is the next wave of players? That is what he must find out.
Building a team for the next World Cup is the greatest challenge of Farrell’s time as Ireland coach. There is no time to lose.
