History is bunk for this brilliant Ireland team

THE belly of the beast, that’s what it looks like, that’s what it feels like, that’s what it is. The stands seem to loom over the pitch, closing in on all sides to make for a claustrophobic cauldron.

Never would you feel confident in an Irish team travelling to Twickenham. Decades of conditioning bred that instinct in us and before that centuries of subjugation. It was a place to fear, a place to be awed by.

Even as our record there improved it retained that intimidating aura. So much so that many of us refused to believe the evidence of our own eyes when we considered what might come to pass on Saturday afternoon.

There was a surprising amount of pessimism in the air last week. England talked up, Ireland talked down. A Pavlovian response and a defensive mechanism. It was as if people were talking themselves out of getting carried away.

The fear of disappointment was almost tangible in any conversation with the casual rugby fan. For some of us England’s poor form was less a cause for optimism and more a cause of wariness. They can’t be as bad again, there has to be a kick in them.

Trusting our gut when we should have been trusting Joe Schmidt, when we should have been trusting this remarkable group of Irish rugby players. As hopes and fears and dreams and expectations swirled all around them, they kept their eyes on the prize.

Their passion tempered by their professionalism, by their faith in their processes, by their faith in one another, Ireland gave one of the all-time great Six Nations performances. Twickenham didn’t cow them, it didn’t cow young players who’d never even played there before like lock James Ryan.

This Irish team is different, this Irish team is special. It helped, of course, that Ireland got off to the best possible start with a try just six minutes into the game. A well-drilled team move saw the men in green ruthlessly go for the jugular right from the off.

Jonathan Sexton’s Garryowen. Rob Kearney’s relentless chase. Garry Ringrose’s poacher’s instinct. It all added up to catch a new-look English team off guard. No coincidence there. Ireland poke and prod and exploit what they can, where they can, when they can.

For all the talk of Ireland as a structured side, implementing Schmidt’s vision, it’s their on-field intelligence that stands out most of all and central to all that is Sexton. The disciple of Schmidt in whom the coach in turn implicitly trusts.

More so even than the partnership with the brilliant Conor Murray, it’s the link between these two men that’s driven Ireland to these new heights. We’re tempted to say Sexton is Ireland’s indispensable man and, yet, if this championship has taught us anything it’s that no man is indispensable. Look at the players who’ve missed out, look at the players who dropped out through injury over the course of the campaign, then look at the guys who replaced them. What you won’t have noticed is any discernible drop in standards.

Teams win games and squads win championships. Ireland now have the best squad in northern hemisphere rugby and, arguably, about the only squad comparable with New Zealand’s. If such talk sounds to your ears like so much hubris we couldn’t really blame you. We’ve been here before. Before every World Cup going back a decade or more and each time we’ve been left bitterly disappointed. Our inflated expectations blown out of the water by cold, hard reality. So why should this time be any different? Did we not have Schmidt as coach last time around? We did, but this feels different. This frankly is different. Ireland are playing better than ever before.

The overall quality of player we have at our disposal is better than ever before. The breath and the depth of that talent is unparalleled. Just because we never have doesn’t mean we never will.

The World Cup has to be the target, otherwise we’re just spinning our wheels here and that’s not something we’d imagine Schmidt would ever countenance. He’s far from an arrogant or boastful man – for that there’s Eddie Jones – but he’s an obviously ambitious one.

Bit by bit he’s building something special. He’s not going to worry about our hangups and neither are these young players. They’ve known nothing but success. That brings a healthy fearlessness and devil may-care spirit.

Jacob Stockdale never once looked intimidated by anything which faced him during the championship. To that end he finished it by scoring more tries in a single campaign than anybody in history.

For these guys the future is their own. As Henry Ford so memorably put it, “history is more or less bunk. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.”