Rhys Ruddock

A worrying picture is beginning to form of this Ireland pack being ranked below previous Irish versions at World Cups. That theory can be altered over(...)

Storm clouds gathering again. Ultimately the severe weather alert for the opening weekend proved unfounded, with the New Zealand-South Africa game una(...)

Rory Best is right. This is not the largely joyless campaign of 2007 revisited. This is a much more united squad, far better prepared, with more devel(...)

Ireland 35 Russia 0 By any normal yardstick securing a bonus point just past the hour, scoring five tries in total, keeping an opposing team scoreles(...)

How to frame Ireland’s bonus point win? Yes, a bonus point is what we had hoped for, a result which would lead to a happy camp. But for so much of the(...)

Joe Schmidt’s Ireland no longer looks like a Joe Schmidt team. Successful Schmidt sides - all of them up until 2019 - needed Johnny Sexton to guide t(...)

Joe Schmidt had sensed an anxiety and hesitancy in Ireland’s defeat by Japan and this appeared to resurface in a scoreless half-hour in the middle of (...)

A five-try, bonus-point win against a Russian team that played 20 minutes with 14 players will feel underwhelming, especially given the nature of the (...)

There were times in that second half when Donal Lenihan was so down in the dumps he tried to lift his spirits by playing a game of spot-the-look-a-lik(...)

On a rainy night in Kobe, Ireland left a steamy arena with a necessary win over modest Russia but without fully rediscovering the collective strength (...)