Ireland’s historic win shows folly of the Lions

Damian Stack looks at some of the stories making backpage news over the past seven days

LOGIC played very little part of our consideration of this game. Fatalism featured more prominently than it probably ought to have done and in that, we suspect, we weren’t the only ones.

It’s the nature of the fixture, the history of it, the memories of the last time they played so fresh in the memory that scepticism and fatalism were the natural default position. A comfort blanket and the coat of armour all in one.

Even before the game kicked off we were rationalising the prospect of defeat by focussing on who wasn’t there in Soldier Field instead of who was. No Peter O’Mahony. No Seán O’Brien. No chance.

The glory of sport is the ability to expect the unexpected. When it comes to the All Blacks we’d lost that and, perhaps, that’s why when the unexpected finally arrived we were so unprepared for it.

We were shocked – despite the evidence of our very eyes – as much as we were in the mood for celebration. This isn’t how the story goes. This wasn’t the expected ending. Ireland ripped up the familiar script in Chicago and not before time.

One hundred and eleven years of history and heartache overcome with one of the most impressive performances in the history of Irish rugby. Joe Schmidt’s men were sensationally good, something that we couldn’t necessarily appreciate as the action unfolded.

That probably had a lot to do with how the game started, with the way the All Blacks broke for a brilliant try just after Ireland took the lead through a Jonny Sexton penalty. There in the starkest of terms was all those years of history made manifest.

Memories of Waisake Naholo’s break and George Moala’s finish were always there in the back of our minds even as Ireland opened out a seventeen point lead by half-time.

Ireland were helped by the sin-binning of Joe Moody for a tip-tackle on Robbie Henshaw – it really ought to have been a red card – but there was more to this performance than just a temporary advantage in numbers.

There was a control and a precision to what Ireland did that belied the amount of preparation they would have done. New Zealand really should have been the more composed team, the slicker team. In the first half it was the other way around.

Ireland dominated both the possession and the territory. Aside from that early Naholo break, the Irish defence held up really well to scrutiny so much so that when the All Blacks sought to put the pressure on for a try just before the break they were easily repelled.

Yet even then with all this evidence telling us this was a real chance for Ireland we refused to believe, or more accurately we refused to allow ourselves to dream. Even into the second half when the Irish had opened out twenty two point lead with half an hour to go following a brilliant try by Simon Zebo, that reticence remained.

Under normal circumstances a team should win from there. As a matter of fact it would have to be considered a complete disaster if they hadn’t managed to do so. These, of course, weren’t normal circumstances and the All Blacks are not an ordinary opposition.

They proved that with three rapid fire tries over the following twenty minutes and with those three tries we began to feel a certain amount of relief – we were maybe even a little smug – that fatalism was our default position. How much worse would we have felt had we gone all in following Zebo’s try?

That’s what made what followed all the more remarkable and memorable. Ireland threw off the shackles, refused to accept that anything was inevitable, grasped for themselves the hand of history and forced it to their will.

Robbie Henshaw’s late try blasted away any vestiges of an Irish inferiority complex when it comes to New Zealand and in doing so blasted the sporting rationale for the British and Irish Lions to smithereens.

A world in which the Irish can go away from home – albeit to a neutral venue – and beat the All Blacks is not a world where Irish players need to band together with their counterparts from England, Scotland and Wales for a summer tour once every four years.

To the uninitiated – and that certainly includes us – the Lions is one of the most tiresome exercises in modern sport – from the endless speculation to the gnashing of teeth every time somebody refers to the British Lions without attaching that all important suffix “and Irish”.

More importantly than that there’s a strong case to be made that the Lions do more harm than good for the development of northern hemisphere rugby. Think about it would the All Blacks give up a quarter of their preparation time in each World Cup cycle? Not a chance and yet the four unions on these islands do precisely that.

It’s a god-awful waste of time. The Aussies, the Kiwis, the South Africans and, now, the Argentinians can focus for the whole of the four year cycle on preparations for the World Cup and we cannot. Is it any wonder then that the Webb Ellis Cup has come north of the equator just once after eight World Cups in the last thirty odd years?

Ireland’s time has come and the Lions time has well and truly come and gone.