When World Rugby decided to introduce the Nations League — to be clear, I decided to challenge myself here by not googling if that was the name of this thing or not, but I’ll check it to be sure in the third paragraph — my initial feeling was “I don’t care about this”.

I still don’t, to be clear, but that’s what I felt first.

The Nations Championship (!) (aha!) is billed as a baffling and somewhat off-putting “battle of the hemispheres” thing, which I’m not sure anyone cares about all that much unless you’re six replies deep in the comments. This is the championship for the guys who, now that all other arguments are lost, have settled on where they happen to live relative to the equator as the argument-settler. It’s one in the morning; your team might have lost, but we have to remember that the half the planet you happen to live on has won more World Cups. Your team might not have, but teams on your side of the planet did.

It’s too late. They have portrayed themselves as the gleaming, unbothered southern hemisphere, and I as the seething, floundering northern hemisphere. It’s over. And I know it’s over.

That’s the angle.

Now, you could argue that a “battle of the hemispheres” is dead in the water before kickoff. Nobody’s rooting for the team next door; local rivalry doesn’t switch itself off because a marketing department reminded you that the equator exists.

The only people who’ll cheer for their neighbours are pick-me nerds — the “credit where it’s due” merchants, who would honestly rather be magnanimous than happy.

You might also say — rightly — that Japan is technically and geographically in the northern hemisphere. Maybe it’s spiritually in the southern hemisphere? If we’re going down that route, I’d say France is spiritually in the southern hemisphere, too, but that doesn’t feel like a fair trade for my beloved northern hemisphere. I’m getting into it now. I’m filled with hemispherical pride. The water swirls down the drain counterclockwise here. You’ll never sing that.

From an Irish perspective, Andy Farrell has already set his stall out. He wants to win this Nations Championship. He’s going to do it for the Big North. The Welsh, Scottish, English and French will be ecstatic for us. It’s all of our Nations Championship, really. We did this.

For those of us who have a hard time accepting change, this summer tour is no different to any other summer tour. It would be nice to win the games, of course, but it’s not the end of the world if we don’t. Very few test coaches lose their jobs over results that happen in July. Of course, it would be better that, if you were to lose, you don’t ship 30/40 points while you’re at it, but that’s just common sense.

We have Australia this weekend, then Japan, before finishing off with a game against the All Blacks at Eden Park. As it stands, I think we’d be doing very well to come out of this tour (?) (block?) with two wins from three, assuming we’ll beat Japan, which we probably will.

Australia will be trickier than it might seem looking at the world rankings, and New Zealand at Eden Park is like trying to get the water to drain clockwise in our beloved northern hemisphere. It’s very difficult, if not impossible.

Here’s the thing, though. If you went looking for the ideal moment to throw a few new caps in and see what you’ve actually got, you’d struggle to design one better than this.

Ireland are at the arse end of a season that, for the spine of this squad, never really had a start or a finish — a lot of these men were on Farrell’s Lions tour this time last year, the one that rolled all the way into August. They’ve gone again since, through a full provincial season and a Six Nations, and they’ve landed in Sydney carrying the bumps to prove it. Caelan Doris, the captain, is gone. So is Jack Crowley. Tommy O’Brien out, too. James Lowe has been banished to the shadow realm in Japan (in the northern hemisphere). Stuart McCloskey turned up with a hamstring injury, Tadhg Beirne with a knee injury, and a few others with general injury concerns. This is precisely the squad, in precisely the competition that — whatever the branding insists — still smells exactly like a summer tour, where most countries would spread the minutes about and have a proper look at what they have in the wider squad.

Ireland, congenitally, tend not to do this.

O’Connell all but confirmed it this week. The Nations Championship “feels like a summer tour,” he allowed — and then made clear it’d be treated like every Irish tour before it: no easy games, nothing handed out for the sake of it, nobody capped just because that’s what other teams do in the summer.

Farrell named three uncapped Connacht lads — Billy Bohan, Sam Illo, Sean Jensen — and the only reason the Ward brothers are within sniffing distance of a debut is that two established men got hurt. That’s the Irish way with unestablished players: it never arrives through the front door marked opportunity; it slips in the back door when one of the white knights gets injured.

And the bother with running it like that is that the bill just keeps getting deferred. This is a win-now team whose win-now core is quietly, or not so quietly, getting on, and every summer we decline to find out whether the next group can hack it at this level, the more you guarantee you’ll find out at the worst possible moment instead. A World Cup quarter-final in Australia, say, which is no longer some far-off thing, but a little over a year away.

But there’s more to it than that.

Andy Farrell knows that Ireland have gone off the boil. We lost twice last November to the All Blacks and the Springboks. We decisively lost the Six Nations final on the first day of the tournament against France and then spent the rest of March convincing ourselves that the birthday cake we dropped was not only still good, we actually preferred it on the floor. Talking about how a Triple Crown is nothing to sniff at in the same year that England lost to Italy is marvelling at the wonders of the deconstructed floor cake, and how much easier it is to scoop up in handfuls from there.

This summer is an opportunity for Farrell to inject a bit of life back into this team, the only way he knows how. Results.

He’s right to think that way. Farrell is smart enough to know that the hero worship the Irish Rugby media currently has for him — eight-year-olds think about Wolverine with more restraint — will only last as long as results make that feasible. He has more wiggle room than any coach other than Rassie Erasmus in that regard, but it’s not an inexhaustible amount of credit in the bank.

He knows well that if Ireland lose to Australia, New Zealand, and the Springboks later this year — with a tricky game against Argentina in there too — he’ll only have the 2027 Six Nations to turn around the squad for the World Cup.

Farrell’s not worried about his job here, far from it. He’s on contract until 2031. But he is worried that a number of his core guys, his reliables, his white knights, are getting to the end of their careers at once, and even the guys who aren’t at that stage yet — Doris, Porter, Hansen, and a few others — are picking up sticky injuries that they never really did before.

If you need to win, what do you do if you’re without the guys you’ve relied on to win?

That’s the question Farrell must answer this summer, and it starts this week.