Build your squad on a base of experienced players

So it all starts here. Well, for some it does, with the Six Nations kickoff this weekend being the first international rugby since the World Cup final and hence the start of the next four-year cycle building up to Australia 2027.

For Australia, a dramatic build is necessary, but looking through the Six Nations squads it is clear that not all the coaches are thinking ahead to the next World Cup. Ireland coach Andy Farrell has said as much. For him, this Six Nations is about continuing where his men left off last year. His choice of captain to replace retired Jonny Sexton mirrors that.

Sexton was 38 at this recent World Cup, so it is possible that Peter O’Mahony will still be leading Ireland in Australia. He will celebrate his 38th birthday during the tournament. But 38 is a freaky age for an international player to still be at the coalface. He’s already played 101 games for Ireland, which makes him unlike the late blooming Deon Fourie, who was 37 when he played for the Springboks at the most recent World Cup but was yet to play an international game this time two years ago.

SA, who start the next cycle as reigning World Cup champions by facing Ireland and Portugal in July, will face a similar dilemma to the one Farrell did when choosing a captain for this next period.

Siya Kolisi will be 36 at the next World Cup, which is just young enough for him to play a possible role, but will he still be hungry enough?

It doesn’t matter as much as many people think it does. The Springboks who won the 2007 World Cup like to refer to a speech coach Jake White made to them when they first came together at the start of 2004, ironically also for a series against Ireland, as the starting point to their journey to becoming kings of the world.

The Boks had been a disaster at the previous World Cup just six months before that, so the incredulity that greeted White’s pronouncement that they would be tasting World Cup success four years later was understandable.

But many of the players who were in the room when White made that speech were not in Paris in 2007. The two centres who started that four-year cycle, De Wet Barry and Marius Joubert, were both long gone by then. So was White’s first flyhalf, Jaco van der Westhuyzen. One of the heroes of that World Cup, Frans Steyn, was still at school.

Four years is a long time, and I’d add an additional point — international rugby loses something if every game played in the four-year gap between World Cups is seen as preparation for the global event.

Again, the SA experience provides a perfect example of the folly of thinking that giving combinations maximum game time together is a fail-safe way of winning a World Cup. The team that retained the World Cup in France last October showed a lot of continuity from the one that won in Japan, but if you’d predicted a few months before the tournament that the Boks would win it without Malcolm Marx and with Fourie playing 78 minutes of the final as a stopgap hooker you’d have been laughed at.

You’d also have been laughed at if you suggested they’d win the World Cup with Handré Pollard not being part of the squad for the first two-thirds of the tournament, and with Manie Libbok, who had comparatively little international experience, starting two of the playoff games.

Libbok may have been the wrong choice for a wet semifinal against England, but the Boks would not have got that far if they had not matched France’s three first-half tries in the quarterfinal with three of their own. Libbok was pivotal to that and therefore as much pivotal to that win as Pollard’s nerveless placekicking in the tight finish to the game.

It is important to build your squad around a core of experienced players, but then that is what is required of selection when winning. The Bok objective for this year should not be dissimilar to the Irish one: the immediate Irish objective is to win the Six Nations; the Bok objective should be to beat Ireland.

And if that requires them to rely on the players that won the World Cup and not exclusively on players seen as likely to be in Australia in 2027, then so be it. The Boks haven’t beaten Ireland since 2016, and they lost their pool game to the then No 1 team, so there is unfinished business.

Of course, there will have to be renewal over the next four years, but there will be enough experienced players travelling the full journey over the next four years to guide the newcomers in the way that Libbok and company were guided by their more experienced teammates last year.