The Ireland tour which time forgot
LONG before the days of player welfare and minutes management, Ireland embarked on a tour that, to this day, beggars belief.
The year was 1967, and Ireland were packing their bags and preparing for a first tour to Australia. Eugene Davy’s charges headed south with the bare minimum in terms of equipment and an itinerary that would make current boss Joe Schmidt red with rage.
The victorious expedition of 1979 tends to get all the attention, given the Ollie CampbellTony Ward saga, but there was something truly remarkable about Ireland’s exploits 12 years previously.
The gruelling schedule crammed in six games in a demanding 20day schedule, with one Test meeting against Australia penned in alongside five matches against various regional teams.
While their surroundings were totally new to Davy’s Ireland team, the opposition was not. The May 13 meeting between Ireland and Australia at the Sydney Cricket Ground was to be the fifth meeting between the two teams, but the first outside of Lansdowne Road.
Australia had won the first two clashes in 1927 and 1947 before Ireland edged a 1958 meeting 9-6 and recorded a 15-8 win four months before the Sydney game. (To avoid upsetting readers in the south of the country, we will also note Munster’s January 1967 defeat of Australia on an 11-8 scoreline in Musgrave Park).
Davy was working with a talented, yet relatively unheralded team. Ireland had not won a Five Nations title in 16 long years and arrived in Australia as heavy underdogs, given little chance of causing an upset on the rockhard pitch in Sydney.
As a rule, northern hemisphere teams did not win games south of the equator — the France team that won on South African soil three years previously were the only side yet to achieve the feat.
Ireland began their summer sojourn in Brisbane’s Lang Park, a ground now lcompletely unrecognisable in its current incarnation as the Suncorp Stadium.
Against a Queensland representative side, Ireland ran out 418 winners, and over the course of the following eight days they lost to New South Wales before beating a New South Wales Country Districts XV four days before the main event in Sydney.
Davy, a former fly-half for Lansdowne who had 34 Ireland caps to his name, had at his disposal a team brimming with talent. Legends of the Irish game such as Tom Kiernan, Mike Gibson, Ken Goodall and WillieJohn McBride were all on the team-sheet for the clash with Australia, but two weeks into the tour his side were partly held together by duct-tape.
The biggest decision facing Davy was trying to figure out who was still fit enough to last the pace — this was in the days before substitutions — and the sight of battered scrum-half Brendan Sherry lacing up his boots was a surprise to his teammates in the away dressing room at the Sydney Cricket Ground.
No-one quite knew how, but team doctor Jamesie Maher had managed to patch the Cork man up sufficiently to start against the Aussies.
With legendary Munster fullback Kiernan as captain, Ireland recorded a famous 11-5 win, a scoreline which didn’t do the away side’s dominance justice — television cameras later proving Australia’s sole try should not have stood as Ireland’s Niall Brophy had beaten Wallaby captain Ken Catchpole to the ball.
After Paddy McGrath had crossed for Ireland, scrum-half Sherry played a key role in the game’s decisive score.
Jogging over with ball in hand to a scrum that was already in full flow, Sherry eventually broke free from the back of the scrum and, after a dummy, fed Mike Gibson, who set up centre Jerry Walsh to crash over with two Australians hanging off him.
Kiernan added a conversion and a drop goal to seal a first win for a Five Nations side in Australia in front of over 32,000 fans — a larger audience than will squeeze in for today’s second Test at Melbourne’s AAMI Park.
Davy’s history-makers celebrated accordingly, with Australian media reporting that Irish players had sparked a riot at the Chevron Hotel later that night.
There was plenty more incident in store — when Ireland played a Sydney representative side three days later, the home side’s jerseys fell apart after being washed with too much bleach, with some Sydney players forced to play out the final stages naked from the waist up — a fitting image from a memorable adventure during the summer of love.
Ireland arrived home as heroes, but could hardly have envisaged the desperate run of results that lay ahead when faced with Australian opposition — later that year, Australia picked up a trio of wins in Ireland during the first incarnation of the Compromise Rules GAA Series.
Ireland defeated the Wallabies three times in four meetings between 1968-1979, before entering an 11-game losing run that lasted over 20 years.
Still, whichever way this eventful rivalry unfolds over the next number of years, the Ireland heroes of 1967 will always have a special place in the history books.