The November internationals were a bit of a mixed bag but the performance against the All-Blacks gave cause for optimism. So should we be more positive about the future of the Irish rugby team after the Autumn? Two JOEs join the debate.
Declan Whooley says… Two losses from three in Autumn, yet there are huge grounds for optimism for this Irish team. And no I’m not hopping on the moral victory bandwagon.
The Guinness Series was perhaps a synopsis of Irish rugby since that glorious Grand Slam day in Cardiff. We can get past teams without being spectacular (Samoa), can be incredibly underwhelming and disappointing (Australia) and can also mix it with the best on our day (New Zealand). They say it’s the hope that kills you, but it is further proof that when (and we do need certain factors going our way) we turn it on, Ireland is a team to be reckoned with.
After the shock subsided on Sunday, a lot of focus turned to moral victories and how we need to move past this. The Sean O’Brien interview only fuelled this, but who exactly is claiming a moral victory? No-one in camp certainly and it easy to forget that this is one of the great teams they faced. If the soccer counterparts were leading against Spain going into injury time only to lose out, would the reaction be any different?
November gave Joe Schmidt the chance to get a look at his squad, and many aspects and particularly players will have given the ex-Leinster boss plenty of encouragement. Some players put their hands up to show they are more than capable at this level (McGrath, Toner and McFadden), our consistent performers kept up their usual standards (Heaslip, Best, O’Connell) while we’re not short on genuine world class either (Healy, O’Brien and Kearney).
Yes we have ghosts of previous World Cups where we have under-performed and a string of Six Nations performances that has left many of us scratching our heads, but those with longer memories will be only too aware of our collection of silverware in the past. Or more to the point, the lack there of. Excluding Italy who only joined in 2000, we have the poorest record in the Championship, so we don’t have a Divine Right to win just because we have had a particularly good crop of players coming through at the same time. Hence why such performances should be lauded as a springboard for better things.
It goes without saying that we need more consistency, but it’s not realistic that we need the incredible level of performance we witnessed on Sunday to win the Six Nations next year, or dare we dream of a Grand Slam. Possibly the visits to Paris and Twickenham will require something of a similar vein (perhaps the reason we are fourth favourites for the Championship despite running the Kiwis so close), but the bottom line is that we have all the tools needed to churn out the required performances when needed.
The burning question for Schmidt, is can he eek it out of this bunch of players when it matters most? In my humble opinion, if anyone can, he can and for that reason alone, the future is as bright as it has been since 2009.
Conor Heneghan says… Forgive me for kicking a collective group of men while they’re down, but I’m not necessarily buying into the wave of optimism that appears to have followed the initial wave of depression that arose in the immediate aftermath of the defeat to the All-Blacks on Sunday.
It’s definitely a good thing that people are accentuating the positives in what is something of a cathartic exercise following Sunday’s devastating defeat. To dwell on it would make one even more depressed and the best thing to do is to park it and move on as quickly as possible. But there’s no need to get carried away either; one great performance does not a great team make.
Before I go on, I should state that Ireland were absolutely brilliant on Sunday. Yes we lost and yes, Joe Schmidt and his players will take no consolation in the quality of the performance or in any talk of moral victories, but the performance in itself deserves to be placed in some sort of context.
We’re talking about one of the greatest All-Blacks teams of all time that Ireland went within seconds of beating on Sunday and for all the suggestions that they might have been tired at the end of the long season, they certainly weren’t lacking in motivation; the need to complete a perfect season and to avoid a first ever defeat to Ireland made sure of that.
Ireland, as I expected they would, proved that, despite suggestions to the contrary following defeat to the Wallabies, that they are a very good rugby team. They were a good rugby team before the November internationals and they still are now, but it’s backing up those great performances and achieving consistency that has been a major problem in recent years and, if anything, the November series highlighted that the problem hasn’t gone away.
Ireland have had a history of producing big one-off performances without necessarily backing it up in recent years. Think Wales earlier on this year, England at the Aviva in 2011, Australia in the World Cup a little later on in that year; all of those results ultimately proved futile in terms of any palpable success they were responsible for.
Every year, at the start of the Six Nations, we look at the competition and think there’s a trophy there for the taking, yet, since the Grand Slam win in 2009, it’s been disappointment after disappointment for the men in green.
Correctly, with a new manager and considering that the All-Blacks game will still be relatively fresh in the memory, Ireland will go into next season’s tournament with the same attitude. But are there any more reasons to be optimistic than in other years?
I would worry, for example, that the leaders in the team are becoming increasingly unreliable through little fault of their own. Thankfully Paul O’Connell has enjoyed a decent injury-free run of late but he has endured a horrid run of injuries in recent years. Brian O’Driscoll rarely seems to play for Ireland these days without having to be carted off before the finish and Jonathan Sexton is being run ragged in France with a schedule that is obviously having an adverse effect on his well-being.
We have players coming through but the players mentioned above, along with the likes of Rory Best, Sean O’Brien and Rob Kearney, still wield a huge influence on the Irish team and the absence of one or two or more weakens us massively.
People talk openly about the waning influence of the likes of Brian O’Driscoll and Gordon D’Arcy but nobody is doing near enough to displace them in the team at the moment and it must be a worry, less than a year before he retires, that despite the promise of Robbie Henshaw and the potential of Luke Fitzgerald, Keith Earls and even Jared Payne to fill the role, there is no direct identifiable successor to our greatest ever player in the number 13 jersey.
Replacing, or having viable alternatives to, the leaders in the Irish team and the ability to perform consistently, are issues that Joe Schmidt will have to address in the coming months and in the seasons leading up to the next World Cup and his time at Leinster suggests that he is the man to do just that.
After the Six Nations, I hope I am as optimistic as some Irish supporters seem to be this week, but I’m reluctant to get too carried away just yet.
