Winning the World Cup would be seismic for the game of rugby in Ireland.
I can’t stop thinking about it.
I work with the IRFU on the AIL – you should get to more AIL games if you can, by the way – and when I think about what a World Cup win would do for every rugby club from Ballynahinch, to Lansdowne, to Clonmel, to Buccaneers, to Mallow, to Dolphin, to Young Munster, to Killarney to Dingle to Queens University and literally everywhere in between – my mind boggles at the possibilities. Not just stretch goals either, actual tangible right-now benefits.
More interest from both casual fans and the media. More bodies paying through the gate from club to provincial to national. More sponsors paying big money. More young people seeing Ireland becoming World Champions on TV and, right then, deciding they want to go out playing with a rugby ball afterwards and maybe asking their parents about training down at the local club.
If Ireland were to lift the Webb Ellis trophy on the 28th of October in Paris, the effects would be felt for a generation. Longer, maybe. You might think it’s fanciful but when it comes to the Irish public, nothing draws people in like a winning bandwagon. And we want that bandwagon.
If a rising tide lifts all boats, Ireland winning the World Cup this October would be a tsunami that not only lifts all boats higher than they’ve ever been, it would change the landscape forever.
That’s what’s actually at stake this Autumn. A new world.
In just three days, Ireland will start that journey but not a journey of hope – it’s a journey of expectation.
There is absolutely no reason whatsoever why Ireland should not expect to, at the very least, contest the final in this year’s tournament. I don’t want to hear about the quarter-final hoodoo. What happened four years ago has no relevance to today. Four years ago, I was looking at the broken wreck of life #4. Four years later, I’m happier than I’ve ever been. I’ve got a beautiful partner, a beautiful little daughter and if you’d told me four years ago that this could possibly be my life, I wouldn’t have believed you. That doesn’t happen for me, I’d have said.
To be honest, if you’d told me that I’d be dead I’d have believed that sooner.
Four years is a long time and we are no more connected to the failures of the past than we allow ourselves to be.
You can just… let them go.
In the last 24 months, this Irish team have beaten everyone they could realistically be expected to beat in this tournament.
Scotland, South Africa, France, New Zealand, England, Australia, Argentina and Wales.
If we can get through our nightmare mode pool and quarter-final draw – a big If – we’ll be playing, in all likelihood, one of England, Argentina, Australia or Wales. If I told you last year that we had to play any of those teams in a one-off game, Ireland would be the red-hot favourites. Win that game and we’ll be looking at New Zealand, France or the Springboks in a World Cup final.
We’ve beaten all of those teams in the last 12 months. You’re telling me we can’t do it again? I don’t buy it. In a one-off game, we can beat any of those teams. We know that because we’ve done it. We also know that it won’t be easy and that the pressure of a World Cup is different from even a Grand Slam decider, let alone a November international.
Three days out from the World Cup, however, I have a few concerns. Indulge me in them for a moment.
The first concern I have is the feeling that while we nailed our system and the cohesion to run it in 2021, a lot of the teams we’ve beaten along the way did not have that same certainty. Essentially, we’ve been the most settled team in the game while most of the sides around us have been trying new combinations, new systems and new core drivers. What will happen if we continue at our current rate as the most analysed team in the game while others improve with nearly three months of highly focused time in camp together and a much lighter travel schedule?
Essentially, it’s one thing to beat the Springboks last November in Dublin when they had three months of guys dropping in and out of the squad while they circumnavigated the globe three or four times over. It’s another thing entirely to play them in the Stade de France, Paris, when we have been their sole focus for months.
My second concern is that this Ireland team can, at times, remind me of Marge Simpson’s Pink Chanel Suit in the episode Class Struggle in Springfield.
In that episode, Marge finds a vintage Chanel suit in a charity shop for just $90 and buys it. What a deal! She never wears anything other than that classic green dress – the Simpsons live a modest life – so this newly found, highly affordable glamour is just the tonic she needs. She wears that suit all over the house and out on her errands, where she even pumps gas in it. That’s when she’s spotted by her wealthy old school classmates who, when they see her in the glamorous Chanel suit, invite her to the country club. She’s come up in the world, they think and that Chanel badge is Marge’s gateway to the life she always envied.
However, she can’t afford to buy a new dress suit so she ends up sewing and resewing the dress for each new invite she gets to give the impression of a new outfit each time. She just wanted to be accepted, for her family to be accepted, and the dress was the passport to that acceptance.
Eventually, the fabric shreds as she’s resewing a new outfit – it was still the same dress suit after all, just pulled in different ways once too often – so she has to pay big money, way more than the Simpsons can afford, for a new outfit ahead of a big night at the country club where they all might get accepted as members. Marge’s dream! After snapping at her family all night due to the anxiety about their shabby, real lives being revealed – and how those wealthy women might perceive it – Marge finally has the defining thought of the episode.
In this analogy, this Ireland squad are the pink Chanel suit and Andy Farrell is Marge Simpson. Stay with me here.
Over the last few test seasons, Andy Farrell has leaned heavily on the Leinster template with his primary team selections, certainly since the summer of 2021. The cohesion advantage of playing 12/13 starters from the same province who train and play in a broadly similar style every other week is not something that any of our direct competitors can answer in a November window or even a Six Nations.
A fully fit Ireland matchday squad in this World Cup will more than likely feature fourteen Leinster players who play and train with each other every work week of the year for the last four years in the current style Ireland and Leinster use. Even then, the players who fill in the weak spots that Leinster have at test level are also highly experienced and highly used components of Ireland’s current system.
The only true bolter in the last few years has been the outstanding Mack Hansen who came in for the injured Andrew Conway and, the regularly injured, Keith Earls and Jacob Stockdale and turned out to be a missing ingredient in our back three – a Layered Inside Winger who was as comfortable handling, passing and kicking as he was at winning aerial duels and scoring acrobatic tries.
My worry is, with Ireland relying heavily on that Leinster template and a very settled core of players in the back five and midfield in particular, how much stress will it take to rip that Chanel suit? Everything on this team is optimised to the last rivet and the combinations are so experienced and the system relies so heavily on those combinations that two or three injuries could devastate us in a way that it wouldn’t for our rivals.
France have lost Baille, Ntamack, Willemse and Danty – four core players – for the All Blacks game this coming weekend, but they have pretty experienced cover to call on. The side they’ve selected for that Pool decider does not look massively weakened and I would still expect them to win it.
If Ireland lost Porter, Ringrose, Sheehan, Furlong and Doris for the South African game (touch wood, for the love of God), all of a sudden things look radically different for that game.
We’ve already seen that when Ireland’s back five blend is upset due to injury, Farrell will deploy Caelan Doris as his utility forward instead of bedding in a possible small forward replacement for Van Der Flier. We don’t want to risk the cohesion in training or on the field that would bring.
This isn’t a criticism of Ireland – we’ve gone with the boiled-down method of preparation with a very complex and involved system localised to a smaller pool of players as opposed to spreading a simpler gameplan across a wider pool of players – but it does leave us vulnerable to the wear and tear of a World Cup in a way that’s almost unique to us amongst the favoured sides.
When you consider the performances in the warm-up games when we’ve had to deviate from the Prime Ireland side we can all name, that is a genuine concern. We are a team built on cohesion so, by default, when our cohesion level goes down, so does our quality.
A complex machine needs specific parts to make it work. A simpler machine can use more generic parts and still function. On the long journey to Paris at the end of October, I hope our complex machinery doesn’t lose the parts we can’t seem to function without.
Otherwise, I fear we’ll break down before we get to where we want to go.
***
I believe in this group of players. I believe in this coaching staff. Why? Because they have gone all in on their plan. They have doubled down when the sensible option would be to widen the scope of their selection and hedge their bets, almost, on change-up options and role variety.
They went the opposite way and stuck with what they know. The most radical selection decision in the last 12 months was to move on from Joey Carbery and invest in Jack Crowley as a possible bench starter back at the tail end of 2022 when the easy thing to do would have been to keep on with Carbery who was playing OK.
Joe McCarthy’s inclusion isn’t likely to affect the big games unless there’s a raft of injuries but even then, he’s a system fit when they could have gone for the changeup option of Jean Kleyn while he was still eligible. I might not like these selections – and could posit a number of players from all four provinces who could maybe count themselves as hard done by – but it shows a coaching group and senior playing group who have a vision for this World Cup and they’re not going to deviate from it. This is what they planned for, this is the system they play and they’re going to live and die by that.
If they succeed, they’ll change the game in this country forever.
If they fail, they’ll take the criticism and they’ll have to live with the expectations they failed to meet. They’ll be called bottlers, losers, chokers – you name it – but that’s the game they play.
It’s win or bust.
Glory or nothing.
That’s the beauty and the pain of the World Cup. And in three days, the journey begins.
