MASTER MIND
Andy Farrell has drawn on a wealth of experience to reshape the Ireland that Joe Schmidt built
ANDY FARRELL is the unquestioned leader of this Irish adventure. The input from the players is significant and there is a degree of collaboration not seen under previous regimes, but Farrell is the mastermind.
He doesn’t wear a name-tag emblazoned with ‘The Boss’, but there are few figures in Irish sport who transmit a more powerful sense of leadership.
This makes attempts to portray him as some muffled ingenue in the era of Joe Schmidt even more bizarre — and laughably far-fetched.
The idea that Farrell could be cowed into sitting with his mouth shut while the last year of Schmidt’s Ireland era veered from shock to crisis to haplessness, is not credible.
Yet he is also a vastly experienced sportsperson, on the field and on the sideline, and 30 years at the top teaches you about a pecking order.
Schmidt was the boss, the final arbiter, and the end result of that was his being cast, implicitly but unmissably, as the main issue with Ireland’s 2019 meltdown in the IRFU review of that World Cup.
By that stage, Farrell was almost a year as coach in waiting, after his appointment was announced in the winter of 2018.
He would succeed Schmidt after the tournament in Japan, and the news came at a time when Irish rugby was on a high. New Zealand had been defeated in Dublin, the summer brought a winning series in Australia, and the previous March, Ireland had won the Grand Slam.
Yet within weeks, the Schmidt years, a remarkably fruitful period of service to the Irish game, were unravelling at their most important point.
England exposed Ireland in the opening game of the 2019 Six Nations in Dublin, the spiral began and its course couldn’t be corrected.
To suppose that Farrell nodded along as Schmidt stayed wedded to a faltering plan is to make assumptions about how Farrell conducts himself that the public impression disputes.
This, remember, is the man who was accused of being the real power behind England’s disastrous home World Cup in 2015. He railroaded Stuart Lancaster into picking league convert Sam Burgess, alleged the critics, who were also unsettled by the fact that Farrell’s son Owen was the pivotal player on the team.
The fall-out left Farrell furious, and it makes one wonder about the presumptions across the water that he will eventually coach England one day.
Colleagues in the UK speak of a cooling in relations with Farrell post-2015 and if they thawed to the point of civility, they haven’t gone much beyond that.
This is a man who knows his own mind — and that’s why, whatever the extent of his ultimate responsibility for the collapse in 2019, he was determined to plot a new way forward for the national team on assuming control in the days after Ireland’s elimination in Japan.
One source close to the camp suggests that the indifferent form of his first 18 months was because he had to effectively reprogramme the players and reintroduce them to the concept of spontaneity and, crucially, responsibility.
Mick Kearney, the team manager under Farrell after serving in that capacity for Schmidt, too, talked yesterday of Farrell introducing ‘softer skills’ compared to the previous era.
‘One of the key differences is that it’s probably a more relaxed environment under Andy than it was under Joe,’ said Kearney, who said he is still in contact with the New Zealander.
The brilliance of the Schmidt effect at Leinster and Ireland sometimes obscures the fact that the approaches were different. He had players at Leinster who were extravagantly gifted across the pitch, and with whom he could work every day.
They played a superb, multifunctional brand that no team in Europe could match for two seasons.
With Ireland, the spread of talent was patchier and the time to work with what he had was much shorter, so he did what outstanding coaches do: he adapted.
And it worked brilliantly in 2014, 2015 and most wonderfully in 2018.
There are key players in the current Irish camp who would still talk in wonderment about his standards, of the absolute clarity he instilled but the near-faultless levels of execution he demanded in return.
That was wearing but it was alleviated by the results: players knew that what felt like merciless drilling was bearing rich fruit, and so they sucked it up.
When the good results dried up and the murmuring began, his methods provided a barnful of sticks with which to beat him.
A substantial amount of the criticism was warranted. It was clear from early on in the 2019 Six Nations that Ireland were stagnant and vulnerable to moderate but well-coached opponents.
Anyone pointing that out was drowned out by cries of ‘In Joe we trust!’ But he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, change course.
Farrell has never laid bare the details of what happened, and no self-respecting coach ever would.
The nature of his relationship with Schmidt now is unknown. Simon Easterby, first appointed as forwards’ coach by Schmidt, and who served for most of his time in charge of Ireland, is another survivor of those times.
The demands of their careers and Schmidt’s return to New Zealand suggests there aren’t many reunions, but sport at this level simply doesn’t accommodate that sort of sentiment, either.
One of the most arresting memories of this job came in the days after Declan Kidney was relieved of his responsibilities as Ireland coach.
We were at a Munster press briefing hours after the news of Kidney’s departure emerged, speaking to players who had played under him for most of their adult lives, between province and country.
And they treated the news as if hearing Robbie had left Take That. It didn’t knock a stir out of them. They had a match to prepare for, and it was easy to believe that some just didn’t care.
These are professional people — and there are few as professional as Joe Schmidt.
It’s why there was a rare moment yesterday when it was actually worth paying attention to Ian Foster, the undistinguished All Blacks head coach who is sliding towards the exit.
He was asked, as every Ireland and New Zealand player will be this week, about Schmidt’s presence, and his potential impact.
‘He knows the Irish well,’ said Foster, ‘but that’s information that we’ve been tapping in to the last 12 months, and getting his nous in and refining how we play.’
Stars like Richie Mo’unga have heaped praise on Schmidt. He will be one of the decisive characters in a drama that is guaranteed to be gripping.
He will have his views, be sure, about Farrell’s Ireland, but Andy Farrell took what he knew of Schmidt’s Ireland — and produced a better, more rounded version.
These are exceptionally talented men, operators comfortable at the chilling apex of professional sport.
Sentiment will not survive in either man’s orbit this week. But their shared history could glean decisive information for the eventual winners.
Farrell spent years learning from Schmidt, as Schmidt created the Ireland that he would eventually build on.
Sentiment will not survive in either man’s orbit this week