If we’re not gonna make it, it’s gotta be you that gets out, cause I’m not capable. I’m fucking Irish, I’ll deal with something being wrong for the rest of my life.
Colin Sullivan, The Departed.
Things have rarely been as fractious in Irish rugby as they are ahead of this Six Nations. In the grand tradition of Irishness, we’re all pretending everything is fine, trying to joke our way out of it or working on aiming a well-placed kick to send the elephant in the room a few metres down the road – to mangle two metaphors together – so we can deal with “it” at some vague point in the future.
What is “it”?
It’s that the Irish national team has never looked less representative of the island as a whole than it does right now. It is, in essence, Leinster Rugby. Maybe you see that and don’t see a problem but it is, and it’s only getting bigger.
We are both uplifted by what Leinster are capable of as a group and also limited by what they are not capable of. The Irish national side is a club side at test level, in all but name. A very good club side – no, a great club side – featuring all-time greats of the sport nationally and globally, but still a club side nonetheless. No other side in the Six Nations is as reliant on one club as Ireland is, and that includes Italy with Benetton and Scotland with Glasgow.
That’s just how it’s fallen, you will hear quite regularly. Tight calls.
When you combine that with what has essentially seen the other three provinces’ budgets cut year after year and the excess sent into Leinster through the vehicle of an unprecedented number of central contracts, the problem intensifies again. Supposedly the Irish selection system relies on your team beating Leinster to get into it – a trial by combat that no other test side requires, by th way – but that becomes ever more difficult as the gap between budgets grows wider.
The gap in budgets wasn’t done on purpose but, you know, that’s just how it’s fallen since the pandemic.
We have the oldest match squad on average in the Six Nations this weekend but the squad has never been harder to get into in the professional era, especially if you’re outside Leinster. Two Munster players were almost signed to play for elite TOP14 teams this season already, entirely off the back of their performances for Munster. These performances were worth contract offers in the hundreds of thousands of euros per year to the TOP14 clubs in question, but somehow aren’t enough to even warrant a training spot within the wider Irish training squad.
It’s just fallen that way. Nobody’s fault.
I’m not telling you my grievances here. I’m well beyond caring about any of this stuff. It is what it is and some of it is already beginning to change.
These sentiments are the ones told to me by so many people working in the game in Connacht and Ulster, never mind in Munster. Even people I speak to working in the Leinster system think that the current makeup of the national side is untenable, unprecedented and the kind of thing that other test sides competing at the highest level have always avoided in the modern era, even when it would have been sensible to do so, for these very reasons.
You can convince yourself that it doesn’t exist, but I’m telling you that it does and for many people, it’s moved beyond the frustration and anger stage, well into apathy. You can walk back people who are frustrated and angry because it means they still care. You can’t do anything with apathy. There are real fissures here and they’re growing. We ignore them or scorn them at our collective peril.
All of that is bubbling below the surface and the Irish coaching and press team seem to be incapable of navigating the flames without petrol leaking out of their pockets at every turn. The defensive and completely needless quote tweet by the IRFU Twitter account of a guy with maybe 200 followers hitting him with that WELLL ACKTUALLY about Sam Prendergast and Jack Crowley a week before a BBC Podcast revealed the same team kept pushing Sam Prendergast over Crowley to outside media is a great example of this. This is incredibly unusual that they even saw fit to mention it.
That kind of subtle – or not-so-subtle – steering sits pretty well with the Irish rugby media but immediately seems off to people who aren’t reliant on access that can be taken away. Believe me when I tell you that it didn’t used to be like this. You would never see a situation like this in years gone by and it’s notable purely because of how unusual it all is. IRFU official accounts quote tweeting randos with terse corrections about photo usage? What’s going on?
It feels like an organisation that is feeling the pressure, feeling defensive and like it has to justify something. What is that something? I think it’s the disconnect often thrown at Munster supporters about their love of Munster is actually in danger of happening with Ireland on an uncomfortable scale. It’s already happening. With every Leinster-heavy teamsheet and wider squad selection, you lose more and more people from outside Leinster who see a team lining up for the anthems and very few people standing in it that they relate to locally. A few people one week, a few more the next, a few more after that. Sooner or later, it adds up.
The only solution is to keep winning.
Winning papers over the biggest cracks and it’s the ultimate shield against criticism of any kind, valid and invalid alike. If Ireland can do three Six Nations titles in a row, very few people will care about how they got there. For a while, I probably won’t but the elephant can’t be kicked down the road forever. Sooner or later, the High Performance Unit at the IRFU will have to address the problems festering in their peripheral vision. Maybe that will be this summer. Maybe it’ll be next November. But it has to be soon.
If Ireland doesn’t have a good Six Nations, those problems will become so big even Irish people can’t avoid talking about them. And that’s when things get interesting. I want what’s best for Irish rugby and that means a fully functional, appropriately funded provincial model that produces a variety of players from all around the country to the national team. I believe we could have that now, this weekend if it was a priority. But it isn’t. Tomorrow is. And then tomorrow, it will be the tomorrow after that. What’s the parable about having all the eggs in one basket? Did that end up being a good thing or a bad thing? I don’t know. Never finished it.
We need a longer-term vision from our head coach that extends outside the Leinster depth chart. Who knows? The path to a World Cup quarter-final might run through places that aren’t a short drive from Sandymount. We need to stop running the national team like the wolf is at the door and that we’re one bad Six Nations from trading bozo slaps with Wales at the bottom of the Six Nations.
We need to spread the net and realise that good players exist in all four provinces and Who Do You Drop need not apply.
I think that will be better for Ireland, better for Leinster, better for the IRFU and better for everyone who loves the game on this island.
