Ireland battling fear they may have peaked already
Schmidt’s side must start to address their World Cup demons today, says Tom Cary
This time 12 months ago Ireland were midway through their annus mirabilis. A Natwest Six Nations Grand Slam and a first series win down under for 39 years had left Joe Schmidt’s upwardly mobile team on the brink of the world No1 spot.
They did not get there in the end. England failed to do Ireland a favour, letting slip a winning position against New Zealand at Twickenham during the autumn internationals. But it hardly mattered. A first ever win at home against the All Blacks the following weekend made Ireland the de facto No1 team in the world.
The mood in the country was positively giddy looking ahead to the 2019 World Cup.
Then the Guinness Six Nations happened. “They came out against England in that first game and just failed to fire,” observed John Hayes in the Limerick Leader this week. “They never got going again. The whole Six Nations was a struggle.
“It happens and you don’t know how or why. You just have to hope now ‘it’ doesn’t happen again.”
The “it” to which Hayes was referring is Ireland’s habit in recent
years of heading to World Cups with high hopes only to depart with their tails between their legs.
The former tighthead should know. Hayes was part of the so-called “Golden Generation”, when a group including Brian O’driscoll, Paul O’connell, Ronan O’gara and Gordon D’arcy in their pomp failed to make it through the group stages in 2007.
Ireland’s disappointment was arguably even more acute in 2015, partly because expectations had been raised so much following Schmidt’s arrival.
Schmidt’s team went into that tournament off the back of successive Six Nations triumphs only to hit the buffers against Argentina in the quarter-finals when injuries to key players O’connell, Johnny Sexton, Peter O’mahony, Sean O’brien and Jared Payne proved too much to overcome.
It would be understandable if Ireland fans headed into today’s match at Twickenham with a sneaking sense of deja vu; the nagging feeling that they have peaked too soon again.
The giddy optimism of January – when O’driscoll confidently stated just days before the England shellacking that man for man he would take only one England player in a combined Ireland team, “and I only said that so he wouldn’t write ‘none’” – has given way to anxiety.
Suddenly the prospect of a quarter-final against either New Zealand or a revitalised South Africa in Japan looks a very tall order.
How can Schmidt recover that optimism of last autumn? A win today would go a long way.
Schmidt has played down his team’s chances, saying his players may be heavylegged following a heavy training block in Portugal and noting that England are “a bit ahead of us in terms of preparation”.
It may just be mind games. But the rhetoric feels different to the start of the year, when he was encouraging his players to embrace the pressure that comes with being favourites.
That is the All Blacks’ mindset, Schmidt reasoned. They expect to win every game.
He wanted his Ireland squad to embrace that pressure. Perhaps it was a step too far. Perhaps Ireland are more dangerous when their backs are to the wall. England should certainly beware. The team Schmidt is putting out today is still more or less the same as the one who won the Grand Slam last year and toppled the All Blacks in Dublin.
Sexton is the notable exception. It is difficult to overstate the Leinster playmaker’s importance to this Ireland team, particularly now that Joey Carbery is injured and in a race to make the World Cup squad. Sexton’s fitness is likely to become a source of national obsession over the coming weeks.
That key position aside, though, Schmidt has done a good job of adding depth to his squad, trying to ward against what happened in 2015. Full-back and hooker are perhaps the other positions where Ireland can ill afford injuries, but they certainly have more depth than they did four years ago. Keith Earls and Robbie Henshaw both miss today’s game, but Jordan Larmour and Bundee Aki – both unearthed since 2015, the former from Leinster’s academy, the latter via residency rules – are more than useful replacements.
Ireland have been blooding players even in the past few weeks.
Jean Kleyn, their South Africa-born second row who plays this afternoon, only qualified this month. Perhaps a correction was a good thing. It was never going to be easy sustaining the form of last year all the way to Japan. But Ireland remain in a strong position.
A win today would actually lift Schmidt’s team to No 1 in the world rankings.
It would be ironic if, after a sobering 2019 so far, their World Cup hopes were reignited with a win against the team who knocked them off their perch.