HAMILTON HORROR SHOW
A humiliation that left Irish rugby on its knees also became a major turning point
HAMILTON, June 2012. New Zealand have just beaten Ireland 60-0. The location is Waikato Stadium press area.
‘Are we done here?’ Rob Kearney was in the dentist’s chair, squirming to get free and return to the relative safety of the visitors’ dressing room. Ireland’s full-back was in no mood to face the media.
Deep in the bowels of the stadium, the inquest was about to begin after a 60-0 trouncing at the hands of the All Blacks. Just seven days after a late Dan Carter drop goal had wrestled another New Zealand win from the jaws of defeat on a sub-zero evening in Christchurch.
Fittingly, Rory Best and Johnny Sexton had also appeared from the sheds to face a grilling from the small Irish press corps that had made the trip to the land of the long white cloud.
There and then, it would have been hard to fathom that all three of those poor souls would beat the All Blacks, eventually… and in Chicago of all places.
There would be Six Nations championships, a Grand Slam and plenty of other riches coming their way.
All three are set to face New Zealand again this weekend, and they will fancy their chances.
They wouldn’t have believed days like that were ahead of them as they mulled over the humiliation. This was rock bottom. Declan Kidney’s contract would be terminated by the IRFU less than a year after the shambolic events of the Hamilton horror show. Joe Schmidt would step in and take Ireland to extraordinary places.
Cian Healy, Best, Peter O’Mahony, Sexton, Keith Earls and Kearney were all involved in that disastrous fixture six years ago and will sound a warning to the younger brigade in the current squad. For all their achievements in recent seasons, the ghosts of Hamilton still haunt many of them.
‘We know when we’re a little bit off against any team we can be beaten,’ Earls recalled yesterday.
‘There’s no real easy games anymore and I think especially against New Zealand, I think the 60-0 was my last game against them, and (I got) a nice forearm off Hosea Gear as well so that’s in the back of my head.’
Gear, the giant All Blacks wing, used Earls as a speed bump on the way to scoring his side’s sixth try that night, though the damage had been done long before then.
Hindsight is a great thing, but there were raised eyebrows when head coach Kidney decided to whisk his squad away to Queenstown for the first half of the week building up to the final game of a gruelling three-Test tour.
The idyllic ski resort in the southwest of New Zealand’s south island was used to great effect as a pre World Cup camp in 2011, and the logic on the 2012 tour was a few days in Queenstown would be a great place to calm the mind and rest tired bodies ahead of the final Test up north.
The players seemed to make full use of all the attractions available. Bungy jumping, jet boat rides across Arthurs Point and trips to Fergburger were the order of the day.
The All Blacks were perplexed by all of this. The word on the street was they were getting beasted up in Hamilton. Steve Hansen had delivered some home truths to his squad early in the week to set the tone while extra players were brought in to beef up the contact sessions on the paddock.
Having crept past Ireland in Christchurch the week before, New Zealand’s head coach was expecting a reaction. The shame of almost losing the first Test in the Garden City since the 2011 earthquakes — which claimed the lives of 185 people — weighed heavily on captain Richie McCaw and his teammates. They would put things right in Hamilton.
There were more worrying signs for Ireland when Kidney made the bizarre decision to call up Paddy Wallace when Gordon D’Arcy withdrew from the squad with a calf injury.
Wallace was lying on a beach in Portugal when he got the call. He only arrived in New Zealand on the Tuesday and was tasked with marking Sonny Bill Williams on the Saturday.
Years later, the former Ulster centre, in a newspaper interview, would jokingly give some advice to younger players: don’t answer your phone if you’re on holidays ahead of a Test with the All Blacks.
The Wallace saga was just one of many system failures that week. It later transpired that the Ireland squad had checked out of the Kingsgate Hotel the afternoon before kick-off in Hamilton. That would never happen under the current regime. The players pretty much checked out after 20 minutes at Waikato Stadium.
Hansen had rung the changes with rookies like Aaron Cruden, Luke Romano and Sam Cane getting a shot at Test rugby and McCaw moving to the unfamiliar position of No 8. The home side didn’t take long to click into gear and raced 26-0 ahead in almost as many minutes. It went from bad to horrific after that. Beauden Barrett made his debut, replacing the stricken Cruden after 24 minutes.
‘It was the highlight of my career, the first opportunity to wear the black jersey, coming off the bench feeling like Superman making tackles I’d never made before,’ he recalled Barrett yesterday.
‘I couldn’t tackle back then so… it just gave me a wonderful sense of power and energy. Yeah, it was a long time ago it seems.’
It was a long time ago. Ireland have learned many lessons since then, but they will never forget what happened in Hamilton.