Rome wasn’t built in day but Italian rugby may take a full generation to develop

THEY say Rome wasn’t built in a day and often a befuddled tourist might wander through the Colosseum and muse that it will look great when it’s finished. But constructing a firm foundation for Italian rugby is a different matter altogether. It is taking at least a generation. They are willing to wait. But is the rest of the world?

Ireland’s toils and the Covid crisis imperilling the tournament’s moneyspinning Super Saturday conclusion has reduced the familiar noises about the Azzurri’s right to be seated at the top table of European rugby.

But the bare facts remain stark. Italy are on a 29-match losing streak in the Guinness Six Nations as they prepare to face Ireland in Rome, and inevitably lose, for the eighth successive occasion.

Ireland have scored 45 tries in those recent seven wins, in four of the last five compiled more than 50 points while Italy have been held scoreless in the second half of the last three.

Ireland have beaten Italy more times – 25 – than any other international side in this century – and there is no earthly logic so suggest that the record will be altered by tomorrow afternoon.

Conor O’Shea (pictured), who spent four winless years as their head coach, before assuming a developmental role with English rugby, maintains that it is not about whether rugby can afford to have Italy at the top table but whether it can afford not to have them there.

Worst

“The worst thing you can do now is contract, and some decisions now could make that happen, which you shouldn’t do,” he said, before watching their latest heavy loss in Twickenham this month. “We should all want teams like Georgia and Romania to grow, but let’s not kill off any other nation while we’re at it.”

Patience is wearing thin, however, as transforming a sport that is not even amongst the top ten in the country, which is not played in any school, and which has a limited geographical spread.

Stephen Aboud has been down this road before. While the game was still amateur – and its administration in Ireland amateurish – he inaugurated the IRFU Foundation in 1993, effectively the forerunner of the Academy which subsequently became provincially regionalised.

For the next quarter of a century, he was at the heart of player and coach education, as well as designing player pathways in Irish rugby which became the envy of the world. He had to move mountains to do so as the IRFU resisted amateurism, then ceded control of their players to England in the late 1990s, before belatedly waking up and smelling the coffee.

It would be no great leap of imagination to suggest – not that he would dare voice it – that a golden generation of 21st century Irish legends owed much to the structural foundations upon which they could parade their talents. Now he is Sisyphus once more, four years into an Italian job that is altogether more forbidding than that which he embarked upon all those years ago.

As much as Italy may be a running joke to many these days, he is old enough to recall the days when Ireland, too, were a laughing stock, especially in the 1990s, quite apart from Italy beating them three times.

Few bothered to take notice at the time, as passers-by flipped him the finger on the way into work in his sponsored car after another embarrassing international defeat, but he and Willie Anderson and others were charged with turning the oil tanker around.

“Our task was simple but not easy,” he says. “We had to make sure we did things in the right way over a long time rather than the wrong way in a short time.”

If one takes a crudely simple measurement – Ireland’s Triple Crown in 2004, the first since 1985 – it had taken 11 years for a signature breakthrough that the public, and the world game, could identify with.

But anyone who had been taking a keener notice – for example the weekend in the spring of 1998 when the U-21s and Students won a Triple Crown, while the U-19s won a World Cup, with teams brimming with future Lions and Irish captains – would have recognised a quiet revolution.

But it had been a slow one, too. Since joining the Six Nations, stunning Scotland in their debut, Italy had long since flattered to deceive, for too long myopically focused on their perilous Test status without addressing the fundamental flaws undermining it from within.

An occasional upset was merely the tip of the iceberg; Aboud’s task, as it had been in Ireland, is to move the iceberg.

He has only been in Italy for four years but he arrived with Italy suffering from a fateful neglect of any sense of organisation in the areas of talent identification and rugby structure. They are getting there but the destination remains distant, naturally since it took so long for the train to leave the station. The wheels are turning, but slowly.

Kids still don’t play the sport in schools but at least now the best of the bunch, instead of hanging around all day waiting for the clubs to collect them in the evening, are being hot-housed in Academy structures.

And to address the fall-off of players between the ages of 18 and 20, there is at least a semblance of a structure for the best of them identified by Aboud and his talentspotters to graduate towards.

Competitiveness at U-20 level hints at gradual improvement and the overhaul of a national team, dominated in recent years by large but ageing personalities, has ushered in a new cohort of exciting, enthusiastic players not weighed down by historic failure.

Emerged

Seventeen of the squad that will face Ireland today have emerged from the pathways and structures honed by Aboud and his team; they have scored more tries than the Irish and kick less than any other team. “When I was finishing,” says the Dublin-born ex-Italy out-half Ian McKinley, “there was definitely a sense that if you were the wrong side of 30, you were the wrong type of player.”

Franco Smith is a coach who knows the country, a departure from predecessors who did not and attempted to impose an ill-fitting style and personality. “I have great confidence in this group,” says the former Treviso coach.

“It is just a matter of time. They will only be in their earlymid twenties at the 2023 World Cup and in their prime for the next tournament in 2027. “Some of the Italy head coaches before me just couldn’t take the risk to invest in the future. “We are obligated to do this. This group will take Italy forward. We know how demanding it will be but we have faith in our project and trust in each other. Those are qualities we need.”