IRELAND 57 USA EAGLES 14 HAS COME

Schmidt’s set to deliver bad news to IRFU chiefs that he will be heading back home to New Zealand after the World Cup finals

BARRING a dramatic 11th hour change of mind last night, Joe Schmidt will have already delivered the bad news to the IRFU.

After the USA game on Saturday, he practically admitted he will be leaving Ireland after seven remarkable years to return to New Zealand for family and career reasons.

It is a perfectly understandable decision – the 53-year-old owes Irish rugby nothing.

But it represents a massive blow to the game here long term.

It is a dilemma he has wrestled with but he has decided to make an early call so the IRFU could put a succession plan in place. It will be a long goodbye but Schmidt is not finished making history with Ireland yet.

The disappointment of the 2015 World Cup lingers so he wants to be big in Japan. And, before that, there is a Grand Slam to be defended.

“I first talked to the family in the summer and I’ll be going backwards and forwards with the IRFU,” said Schmidt late on Saturday night.

“I gave myself the deadline of Sunday or Monday morning to say, ‘This is it’. Definitively. It’s probably frustrating for you guys and I apologise for that. It’s wrecking my head so I can’t wait until I can say, ‘Right, this is it’.

“Either way the next 11 months is massive, whether it continues beyond that or whether that’s the end point. We’ve got the two biggest tournaments we play.

“We’ve got the Six Nations that we’re the defending champs of and the World Cup where we’re certainly not the defending champs because we don’t get past the quarterfinals. We’d love to do that.”

Along with his players and management team, Schmidt wanted to spend what the remainder of Saturday night toasting the November clean sweep.

The eight-try demolition of the US featured Andrew Conway’s try hat-trick, just as Jordan Larmour had stolen the headlines in similar style against Italy in Chicago.

In between there was the “scrappy” win over Argentina, followed by the deserved victory over the All Blacks.

But that reflection period will not last long after the IRFU’S pending announcement.

Schmidt said: “It’s funny, turning the page already, we all operate a little bit like that – ‘We’ve ticked this box, let’s move on and have a look at what’s coming next’.

“It would be pretty hard to top 2018. There’s been some monumental wins.that win in Paris, you don’t get too much more special endgames than that. It got people enormously excited, including our squad. Then you don’t want to waste that, you want to make sure you capitalise and I was delighted with the way that the team did. “We got a few bonus point wins that allowed us to be champions by the time the fourth round was over and we went and chased what we needed to do to get the Grand Slam. That was special. “Australia was special because we put ourselves behind the eight-ball being one down in the series and came back and won a couple of cliffhangers.” And then three home games this month. “Three sold-out stadiums and incredibly encouraging crowds but we were blown away by last week,” he confessed of the win over the Kiwis. “That’s as special as I’ve heard it in my five-and-a-half year stint.”

Schmidt saluted his players who work “incredibly hard” and the support team behind them. He added: “I described during the week that my Carton House family, they’re incredible to work with. “Last week was incredible, you could see how animated, how invested people were. That alone encourages you to do your very best to help those players deliver the performance people are looking for. They make their best efforts to do that.”