TOKYO FALLOUT
Where did it all go wrong for Joe and what does Andy Farrell do now?
THIS is a familiar situation for Irish rugby.
The World Cup hurtles towards its thrilling, decisive matches and the national team look on like the rest of us, their interest over and recriminations hanging in the air like gun-smoke.
Provincial concerns will soon take over, but it won’t be long before Andy Farrell is naming his first Ireland squad ahead of the Six Nations. It falls to him to find a way past the latest World Cup wreckage.
He should take note of some important issues that survived the latest disaster.
Lessons to be learned
TWELVE years on, the memories of spending six weeks covering Ireland’s awful World Cup campaign retain the capacity to surprise.
A collapse of that magnitude was unprecedented in modern Irish rugby, with the side ranking as high as second in the world the November before the tournament.
The problems were obvious before the side left for the tournament in France, but from the first day in their dismal base outside Bordeaux, the feeling that this whole enterprise was careering towards disaster was palpable.
The players weren’t spared in the aftermath of their collapse, but most of the criticism was centred on Eddie O’Sullivan. He wasn’t popular with a number of influential journalists and commentators, and they were openly gleeful as the Irish campaign unravelled.
O’Sullivan limped on through to the end of the Six Nations the following spring, but his time was up long before Ireland’s World Cup campaign was.
The present mess is worse than 2007. This is worse because in the aftermath of that disaster 12 years ago, there was at least hope.
Nine of the team that started in the defeat to Argentina in Ireland’s last pool game of that sorry campaign started in Cardiff 18 months later as Ireland won a Grand Slam.
Three more players involved in the Argentina defeat came on against Wales on a fabulous day for Irish rugby.
Time was still on the side of the golden generation, who finally shone in 2009. The average age of the 15 starters against Argentina in 2007 was 28.9 years; the average of the Irish team that started in last weekend’s annihilation was 28.8 years.
That suggests there is the capacity within this group to revive and contend again. However, the outlook is altered when individual ages are considered. The 2007 team had a core of leaders in Brian O’Driscoll, Ronan O’Gara and Paul O’Connell; they were aged 28, 30 and 28 respectively at the end of their World Cup story.
Ireland’s leaders in 2019 are Rob Kearney, Johnny Sexton, Conor Murray, Rory Best and Peter O’Mahony.
They are 33, 34, 30, 37 and 30. As good as James Ryan is and as important as Garry Ringrose should become in the planning of Andy Farrell, replacing that experience will be a forbidding job.
And it will need replacing, in time for next spring in the case of Best at least. He is the one confirmed departure. Sexton’s future will be debated, too but if he, Kearney and O’Mahony are deserving of their places in the 2020 championship they should be selected.
This is because there is one lesson Ireland need to absorb above all others: the old way of doing things has failed enough.
The Irish system
THAT means the devotion to fouryear cycles has to be revisited.
In response to the loss to Argentina in Lens in 1999, the IRFU reacted in a way that prepared the way for much of the success of the proceeding two decades.
Instead of the Six Nations serving as the framework for the business of the national team, it became World Cups. This broader perspective gave coaches more time and the freedom to develop players, and it worked better than anyone involved could have believed.
This coincided with the emergence of a hierarchy in which the provinces thrived but the greater good was always the fortunes of the national team. In the Joe Schmidt years, that power relationship became even more marked.
Schmidt, together with performance director David Nucifora, presided over a system in which players were redirected to other provinces where they played regularly, again to the benefit of Ireland. The case of Joey Carbery was the most notable example, with reports of Nucifora and Schmidt visiting Leinster’s base one Sunday morning to discuss the player’s future. This was disputed, with Schmidt later saying they were merely interested in knowing if Carbery or Ross Byrne would be interested in a switch to Ulster.
What the episode illustrated was the primacy of the national team, and the success Schmidt presided over, and Declan Kidney and O’Sullivan before him, justified it.
But if the World Cup is now the pinnacle of Test rugby, then the current Irish processes must be studied to see if they are contributing to Ireland’s repeated failures at the tournament.
For instance, the player management system has been hailed in how it protects Irish players from the battering their English and French peers take in their club careers.
Yet England looked powerful building towards yesterday’s semifinal against New Zealand.
Their captain Owen Farrell played 19 games for Saracens last season, all starts. Johnny Sexton played 12 times for Leinster, 11 of which were starts.
English winger Jonny May played 19 times for Leicester, all starts. His Ireland equivalent, Jacob Stockdale, played 12 times for Ulster, starting 11 times.
Maro Itoje played 19 matches for Saracens last term and interestingly, his Irish counterpart, James Ryan, played 16 times for Leinster, starting every time. Ryan was one of the few Irish players to perform to par in Japan.
This is not to argue every Irish player should play every week, but the player management programme, for so long an unquestioned good in the Irish game, should be analysed as part of any review into the latest World Cup failure.
Changing tactics
THAT Schmidt did not develop Ireland’s play enough following the Grand Slam is inarguable. It is unfair, though, to suggest that he didn’t try.
The clearest example was playing Robbie Henshaw at full-back against England in the opening match of this year’s Six Nations. The experiment didn’t work, Henshaw got injured and Kearney was back in the No15 jersey for the next match against Scotland.
That Henshaw was chosen for the English match was recognition, though, that Ireland’s attacking game needed to be varied. Henshaw promised more variation than Kearney, a tough and durable player who proved one of Ireland’s better ones at the World Cup.
But the younger man excited the coaches with the speed and aggression with which he hit the line.
In naming his team to play England, Schmidt acknowledged the decision at full-back was taken with one eye on the World Cup.
‘(It’s a) short-term focus but (it) offers us a hint in the long-term whether that’s something Robbie is comfortable or capable of doing,’ said Schmidt.
Henshaw had a hard time against England, largely as a result of the widespread Irish misfire. But once Kearney got back in against Scotland, the experiment was not pursued.
And by the end of a Six Nations that contained enough alarming signs of regression for anyone who cared to notice (many looked the other way, happy to declare that in Joe they trusted), it was too late to implement the changes that were badly needed.
Farrell and, just as importantly, his attack coach Mike Catt will surely register the need for change. Ireland don’t have to start playing sevens rugby, but they must become more unpredictable and wean themselves off the obsession with power and bruising contact that defined their World Cup effort.
They can do this while retaining veteran players for 2020, but introducing players like Joey Carbery, Jordan Larmour and Andrew Conway would bring badly needed vitality. Then letting them play is even more important.
And it is possible to change course tactically in a short period of time. New Zealand did it between losing to Ireland last November and the World Cup. England did it over the course of 2018, with Eddie Jones willing to suffer a poor year so he could devote time to making his side play more quickly.
Pace is now vital. That is one of the most important lessons of Japan 2019.
No excuses
ACCEPTING that things went terribly in Japan must be one Farrell’s first duties.
As part of Schmidt’s support staff, he bears some responsibility, but he need not be burdened by the failure as he steps up to head coach.
Farrell survived the World Cup disaster England endured in 2015 to become a success under Schmidt, but there should be no resort to excuses when, as he must, he faces questions about his latest World Cup setback.
Schmidt too often sought to use them, and they never made for impressive reading.
At the team’s homecoming this week, he talked about the slippery conditions wrought by humidity affecting his players – as they did every other team in the tournament, however.
Injury concerns that weren’t mentioned last week were apparently not fully resolved until the warm-up on Saturday.
Japan humiliated Ireland but refereeing mistakes were mentioned after that.
The loss to England in August was partly explicable because of all the hard work done in the heat of Portugal. The bus to Murrayfield became infamous after the shock defeat in 2017.
Perhaps it speaks to Schmidt’s deep-lying competitive instincts that he can’t abide defeat, but there comes a time when a team and their leader need to take their beating.
Farrell must understand this, too. It’s not as important as the work he will do in correcting those mistakes, but accepting that Ireland got it horribly wrong over the past 10 months would make for a good start in his new job.