COMFORT BLANKET
Ireland back on safe Six Nations ground but treating World Cup as ‘a blip’ shows why we have failed for 40 years
THERE has been lots of talk this week about the 2023 Six Nations documentary on Netflix. If you haven’t yet seen it, spoiler alert, it’s not great. Not bad, just, you know… grand.
The intention was to draw in the casual viewer and give rugby a ‘Drive To Survive’ type profile boost and maybe that will happen, but it was critically compromised by lack of access and, for those of us still disenchanted by what happened in the months following last year’s Six Nations, it was a bust.
Reliving Ireland’s march to the Grand Slam last season was far more exasperating than exhilarating, more frustrating than fascinating, because we know it ultimately led to nothing.
It was supposed to be part of the plan to change history.
Ireland would gain crucial confidence from a successful summer tour to New Zealand in 2022 – check.
Then they would follow up with an unbeaten autumn. Check.
A spring Slam. Check.
And then bring all this confidence and momentum to France where they would break their World Cup knockout nightmare hoodoo... pfffrrrtttt.
IRELAND’S latest World Cup failure was easily the most upsetting because all the pieces were in place to not only go further than at any stage in their history before but to actually win the whole thing.
Indeed, Ireland came within a Jordie Barrett armpit of revolutionising sport in this country.
When the New Zealand centre prevented Ronan Kelleher from scoring the try that would have won the epic Paris quarter-final, he also prevented the type of nationwide sporting explosion only seen previously for Katie Taylor in 2012 and Italia 90.
You can’t just bury that and crack on. You can’t just shrug the shoulders with an ‘ah well, them’s the breaks, sure we have the Six Nations again soon’.
Yet that is exactly what many appear to have done.
The majority of Irish rugby media and supporters have moved on from our latest World Cup agony with indecent haste and, most worryingly, it feels like the Ireland management have also.
Certainly the squad announced for the Six Nations had a ‘nothing to see here’ feel to it as head coach Andy Farrell and his assistants appear set on sticking to the personnel and formula that delivered so well over the last two years.
You can imagine the reasoning offered up in planning meetings – ‘We have only lost one of our last 18 games, and then only by a whisker, why would we change?’
The problem is, that one loss was in the only game that truly mattered.
It feels as though the World Cup is being treated as a ‘blip’, the word famously used by then-IRFU chief Philip Browne after Eddie O’Sullivan’s team of generational talents imploded spectacularly in 2007. Seventeen years on, we have now managed 10 World Cup ‘blips’ in a row.
That is a horrendous reality which should dominate all else, yet instead Irish rugby and its constituent parts are consumed by the need for immediate success – like a junkie looking for the next hit.
And, at the core of it is a lack of appreciation (and, possibly, lack of knowledge) of Irish rugby history.
LET’S put this in perspective. At the next World Cup in Australia in 2027, Ireland will be closing in on 40 years of failure – this is unique among major rugby nations and it is unacceptable, or should be.
That extreme, sustained level of unfulfillment gives you carte blanche to do whatever it takes and apologise to no one. It is why we were arguing so strenuously for Ireland to rest their main men for the pool game against South Africa last October because the result was irrelevant, once you accepted that there was little difference between facing New Zealand and France in the quarters.
There would have been uproar if Ireland had left out their big hitters against the Boks, but so what?
Forty years of failure brooks no argument and a rest then could have given the team that extra bit of energy and edge they needed against the All Blacks when it really mattered a few weeks later.
Similarly, all the propaganda we hear about the importance of the Six Nations, how it cannot be disrespected by experimentation and how Ireland coaches have to take a win at all costs approach… that should be thrown out the window, too.
Even the most fogeyish of IRFU blazers had to recognise something extraordinary was happening over the course of those heady few weeks in France last year – and how big it could have become if the team had gone further.
The World Cup puts the Six Nations in the ha’penny place. Ireland making the semi-final, or final, would have turned the likes of Dan Sheehan, Caelan Doris and Garry Ringrose into national icons. As it is, non-rugby middle Ireland would struggle to name any Ireland player beyond the now retired Johnny Sexton and (possibly) charismatic centre Bundee Aki. Last year’s Grand Slam did not alter that situation.
THE Six Nations is a wonderful tournament, with great tradition and pomp and profile. However, it is also a millstone around the neck of Irish rugby as it seeks to clamber up to the level of truly elite achievers.
Last year’s Grand Slam was, by definition, a success but did it help Ireland make history later that year? No. Would Ireland have been better served rotating during the Six Nations so they would not have had to rely so heavily on their firstchoice team at the World Cup? Unquestionably.
That is the way Ireland should be thinking now, four years out from the next one – blooding potential, testing promise, mixing it up. Yet instead, they are persevering with the hereand-now approach that has failed them consistently in the past.
There are players in the squad who obviously will not make it to Australia 2027, players for whom Ireland’s quarter-final exit last year would have been a natural, logical stepping-off point.
Peter O’Mahony is a warrior leader who should have been installed as Ireland captain in 2016, not now when he is 34 with his future in the game uncertain.
Ireland left it too late with O’Mahony and they are in danger of doing the same with James Ryan – a player who has appeared destined to lead his country from a young age. Rory Best was 38 at the 2019 World Cup, Sexton was 38 at last year’s World Cup and O’Mahony, if he were to make it, would be pushing 39 at the next one.
After France, Ireland needed to rip it up and start again, just as they needed to four years ago and four years before that. They keep making the same mistakes and expecting different outcomes.
LOOK, maybe we shouldn’t care at this stage. Maybe it is what happens in between World Cups that really matters in Irish rugby and those of us who think otherwise are just bitter old cranks.
Maybe we stay in the now and search for the next fix, like the comfort blanket of the Six Nations.
Maybe we should stick the fingers in the ears, banish thoughts of the All Blacks last October and think happy thoughts?
Maybe we should watch that Netflix show again…