My burning desire is for Ireland to win the World Cup.

Everything I think, analyse, and feel about this Ireland team comes back to that. Imagine what it would do for the sport in this country if we could lift that Webb Ellis trophy? Imagine how transformative that would be for every single rugby club on this island?

I can’t stop hoping that we can actually go and do it. Not half do it. Not valiantly fail at one hurdle or another, because we’ve done all that stuff before. This World Cup, a little over a year away, is the last chance for the group led by the generation of Beirne, Furlong, Van Der Flier, Ryan, Aki, Gibson Park, Conan, Porter, Ringrose, Henshaw, and Keenan to win the big one. After 2027, I think seven of those names will retire within a season; the rest will be doing very well to still be at anything close to their current level by the time 2031 rolls around, and the 2029 Lions might well be their last ride.

At the moment, I think we’re as far away from winning the World Cup as we have been since 2015. In truth, I think we’re sleepwalking back to a place where we’re Scotland+, hoping beyond hope that England don’t get it together consistently because, if they do, we’ll find ourselves locked out of the top end of the game in the Six Nations, as well as globally.

I can’t abide the thought of that, but it’s happening. We’re watching it happen right now.

In our last six games against New Zealand (x3), France (x2) and South Africa, we’ve lost by an average of 15 points. Those teams are the benchmark at the moment, and we’re two scores worse than them since the turn of the 2024/25 season.

You know the old parable — drop a frog into boiling water, and it leaps straight out, but sit it in a cool pot and raise the heat a degree at a time, and it’ll stay put, adjusting to each small change, telling itself it’s grand, right up until it’s cooked. The thermometer is hanging on the side of the pot, and it says minus fifteen points a game against the benchmark sides in the world, among whom the next World Cup winner will be decided.

Anyone who wants to see can read the temperature — we’re just sitting in the water anyway, insisting the pot has always been this warm.

Watching an Australian kick sail wide to win in Sydney, or a last-minute bonus-point win over Japan, or wins over a deeply flawed England, or beating Scotland, who last beat us before TikTok existed, is only proof that we are better than the best of the rest, as it stands. Right now, I think it’s more realistic to think that we’ll drift back towards them than it is to catch up to the top three.

This is a negative outlook, I know, and I’ll go into it in more detail in the Star Ratings, but I’ve just rewatched Ireland lose to a pretty average All Blacks performance, and I can’t think of anyone, bar Jamison Gibson Park, who had a sub-three-star game. That might seem good in isolation — a lot of decent performances, set piece was good — but to me, it’s the biggest warning light that we could see in a game like this. A decent performance from this group, even without Crowley, Porter and Doris, should not translate to a 19-point loss, even against the All Blacks, even at Eden Park.

That’s the stuff that used to happen pre-2016. “Decent performance”, “lots of positives”, and it all seems like picking candles out of a dropped birthday cake when you’re talking about a game we never once looked like winning.

Maybe this is a blip. A two-season-long bliiiiip where we’ll pull it together in the eight competitive games between now and the World Cup. I have my doubts. Guys like Furlong, Aki, Gibson Park, Van Der Flier, Beirne and others are beginning to show the one game on, two games off streak that happens to guys once they hit their mid-30s. Sure, we’ll be better when Porter, Doris and Crowley are back in situ. Hansen, if he’s the same player after his injuries, will help, too, but even players like McCloskey, who’s been a revelation this test season, will be 34 next month.

I don’t see where this head coach finds the 4/5 players he needs inside the next 12 months to freshen up this side, when his filters for who is a test player and who isn’t are so narrow, when the size of the net he casts relates to a system that, on the evidence of the last two seasons, is no longer fit for purpose if winning a World Cup is our aim.

South Africa have a much bigger playing population than we do, can arguably field three different teams at this level, and regularly holds alignment camps for 60+ players in both hemispheres, but we still can’t seem to get away from the same old spine of the team, where it’s harder to get out of the team than it is to get into it. An Irish rugby tale as old as time, and the story always seems to end the same way.

So the question has to be this.

Do we want to win a World Cup?

Because at the moment, as hard-working as we are, as efficient as we are inside the 5m line when teams oblige us with penalty ladders, we look like a team who have decided we’re comfortable in the ever-warming water.

Then again, maybe the water has always been this warm.