All the fanfare might have gone to Johnny Sexton at the weekend but there was another Irish legend who was, in all likelihood, playing his last game for Ireland in the Six Nations too.

Ger’s son.

The Kid.

The Moyross Express.

The Man.

Keith Earls.

It remains a perennial shame to me that the last try that Keith Earls scored in the Aviva Stadium in a Six Nations game was arguably the most important try Ireland have scored under Andy Farrell but it happened in an empty stadium, mid-pandemic.

Conan’s loop out and tap down are good but this is all Earls after the tap down – the acceleration, the drive infield to pull May in before tearing him up with the chop step and the drive to the outside shoulder, all happening at the warp speed that only the elite of the elite are capable of.

Jonny May is no slouch and one of the quickest players in the England side at the time but he’s no Keith Earls.

The Ireland of 2020/21 weren’t the #1 in the world rankings Green Machine, Slam Winning mentality monsters that we know today, two years later. They were brittle, they were error-strewn and they were finding themselves in the post-Schmidt era. The 2020 Six Nations – the embryonic stage of Farrell’s Ireland – started well enough with wins over Scotland and Wales which ranged from janky to functional. Then Ireland travelled to Twickenham where we were roundly humiliated. It was 24-5 to England until the game’s last play where Ireland managed to add a bit of polish to the scoreline. The game finished 24-12 but Ireland would have had to improve three times over to even qualify as being second best in that game.

Then the pandemic hit. You might remember that one.

Ireland returned to action in the Autumn behind closed doors and our first game back was a 50-17 pumping of Italy in Dublin but the cats were well and truly amongst the pigeons a week later when Ireland were well beaten in almost every facet of the game in Paris.

The vibes were… starting to get sour on Andy Farrell and Mike Catt.

A few weeks later, Ireland kicked into the Autumn Nations Series and picked up a few facile wins over Wales, Scotland and Georgia with another dour, emphatic loss in an empty Twickenham to England.

There is a primal fear that floats around the halls of the IRFU and it is this; Ireland being the best of the rest after France and England. In late 2020, that was a very real and present concern, that was enhanced even further by Ireland losing the first two Six Nations 2021 games to Wales and France. We beat Italy – as per usual – and then needed a late, late penalty to beat Scotland in Murrayfield.

Enter England and the last game of the Six Nations. March 20th, 2021. Just a few days under two years to the day that Ireland would beat the same team for a Grand Slam. England hadn’t been playing well during the Championship to that point – Eddie Jones was entering his World Cup-building phase – but they had beaten the French team that had regularly beaten Ireland the week prior and if Ireland lost to them again, there was a very real prospect of finishing fifth. A three-loss Six Nations could have seen Andy Farrell’s job on the line but enter Keith Earls 22 minutes into a game that was balanced finely at 3-3.

From the Wally Ratings;

From the resulting lineout, Ireland hit a lineout move that changed everything about how this team perceived itself. Or at least so it seemed.

 

The concept is pretty simple on that lineout but it’s perfectly executed. Conan starts as a lifter on that scheme but runs out to the tail while Ireland threw up a dummy pod to bind England to a counter-launch.

If you look at England’s defensive layout on those lineouts, the tail gunner is usually Tom Curry. Curry is around 6’1″, being generous, and Jack Conan is 6’4″. The key would be if Conan could win that aerial battle with Curry and if Aki could exert enough gravity on the outside defenders to preserve the space for Earls.

When Earls got the ball and broke past Vunipola it was down to him to find the finish. Boy, did he ever. Earls absolutely roasted Johnny May in the backfield and not only was it the single most coherent lineout strike we had produced in a few years, but it also seemed to energize Ireland. Something we had worked on during the week had come off exactly as we’d schemed it! It sounds like a silly thing but that one clear success can supercharge the collective confidence of the group.

All of a sudden, Ireland were rolling.

Ireland would go on to win the game pretty emphatically, ending a streak of four losses to England on the bounce and finishing a respectable third (albeit on a +1 points difference over Scotland) in the 2021 Six Nations.

Do I want to imagine a world where Keith Earls doesn’t score that try in the manner he scored it? No. I don’t think Andy Farrell wants to either. It’s fair to say that try is one of the most important in the last few years of Irish rugby and nobody was there to see it live. 

Two years on, almost to the day, and Keith Earls is watching Ireland win a Grand Slam in the same stadium against the same opposition from the squad zone behind the bench. When he celebrates the Grand Slam after the game, he does so in the comfort of an anthem jacket. He isn’t togged out – he’s been injured for a lot of the season – but his fingerprints are on that Championship Trophy as much as any other player.

Keith Earls didn’t get the send-off in the Aviva Stadium that he deserved but would never ask for. Injury took that from him, as it so often does to wingers in their mid-30s in this game. But I’ll bet that he took it in his stride and was nearly relieved.

For me, Keith Earls deserves 51,000 people rising to their feet to applaud this great of the Irish game but, God willing, he’ll get it in Thomond Park by the time his career is all said and done.

We wait for the Man to come around once again.