The day that it all changed for Irish rugby
Defeat in Lens was the IRFU’s sliding doors moment
IT’S A sobering thought: what might have become of Irish rugby had Argentina not done the IRFU the massive favour of knocking Warren Gatland’s inadequate side out at the 1999 World Cup finals.
Not that the Pumas stopped being an annoying stone in Irish shoes since — the World Cups of 2007 and 2015 also ended in elimination to the South Americans.
However, that upset in Lens — 18 years ago last month — remains the seminal, standout moment in Irish professional rugby history for it was then that the Lansdowne Road blazers realised they needed to quickly change tack, or their sport would wither on the vine.
The sharp, transformative response which the ambush provoked is why we should forever celebrate what Argentina achieved on that long-ago Wednesday night in France, and not keep looking on it as a dubious footnote that has people breaking out in a cold sweat. That cathartic loss really did save Irish rugby.
It’s hard to believe now, in a climate where Irish rugby is thriving, but four years after rugby gave up its amateur status in 1995, bumbling Ireland still hadn’t properly bought into the idea that the sport was now professional, and they were getting left behind.
Disenchanted players had flown the coop — nearly half of the 30 Gatland originally chose for the 1999 finals were based overseas — and the national team wasn’t a box office draw, crowds of just 30,000 and 33,000 watching two of their three home pool matches at Lansdowne Road.
Also, while Ulster had won a European Cup the previous January, it was only a sticking plaster, as winning a truncated tournament boycotted by the English clubs couldn’t disguise how haphazardly the provinces were being run when the AIL club game was way more popular.
Lens, then, was the IRFU’s sliding doors moment.
If they had kept going in the amateurish way they were doing business, they could easily have become a Scotland, the underachieving rugby country which is still looking for a first Six Nations title all these years later and has only ever had two campaigns in which one of its clubs has reached a European Cup quarter-final.
Instead of continuing with this habitual mediocrity, the union woke up, got its house in order and eventually the rewards came. Grand Slam. Back-to-back Six Nations titles. Three Triple Crowns. Five European Cups in a seven-season spell. Bumper attendances. It all stemmed from the little acorn that was Lens, and the humiliation felt in losing to an Argentina squad that only had five players playing professionally.
If Ireland had won, they would have returned to Dublin for a quarter-final the following Sunday against France and while defeat would have been likely, the IRFU would have declared itself happy with a humdrum, average campaign and nothing much would have changed. They would have kept on repeating their failings.
However, the sight of the Pumas taking on France in that last-eight encounter sharply concentrated minds and prompted a raft of changes. It was a dark time when the union were the butt of media scorn, some damning headlines reading: ‘Way out of our depth’; ‘Ireland has failed on all counts’; ‘Depressing level of inadequacy’; ‘Ireland discover their true standing’.
By the time of the next World Cup in 2003, Ireland travelled with only a handful of overseas-based players, the strength of the provincial teams having been significantly bolstered by the additional finances pumped in by the IRFU to get players back from the UK.
It was the rebirth of the sport we see today. This lean, mean fighting machine mostly keeps its best players based at home and repeatedly punches above its weight in being competitive against the far wealthier English and French operations, for club and country.
‘The IRFU was far too ambitious to step back and say no to change,’ said Eddie Wigglesworth, the IRFU’s former director of rugby, in these pages a decade ago. ‘There was too much at stake. National pride was at stake.
‘There’s only one way to deal with professional sport and that is obviously to endeavour to be an achiever because if you try to hang in there you become a little bit like Leeds United and you end up going down, so you have got to go for broke and you have got to try and achieve.
‘That was really the core ethos of everything, that we wanted to be at the top of the game and we needed to put in the infrastructures to support the programme.
‘Certainly, the feeling of the IRFU committee after Lens was one of absolute annoyance that it really wasn’t going to happen again. Annoyance at ourselves that we let that happen. The reality is that we didn’t step up to the mark in Lens in a game that we should have stepped up to and we got caught, so we came back and said, “Look, we have got to give our teams an equal chance”.’
Muchas gracias Argentina for the terrible defeat. Without it, Irish rugby wouldn’t have reacted so decisively to turn the Lens legacy into inspiration.