Stories
The last time Ireland tanked for a whole season was 1997. They came last in the Five Nations, for the second time in a row, under Brian Ashton, and he handed in his resignation one game into the 1998 season.
Since then the IRFU have appointed high quality head coaches who all added something to the set-up. Warren Gatland took over from Ashton and in his four years in charge beat France twice and was one loss to Scotland away from a Grand Slam.
Eddie O’Sullivan moved Ireland’s attacking game onto a new level and while he never won a Six Nations title, they did become the best team in Europe over the course of his six-year reign.
Declan Kidney had two European Cup wins under his belt before he took Ireland to a Grand Slam in his first year in charge. Then came the best of them all, Joe Schmidt, who moulded the most consistently excellent international sports team the country has seen since the Jack Charlton years.
Farrell has been fire fighting since the moment he took the job. His first Six Nations started off patchy and unfocused.
But Andy Farrell didn’t inherit that team. Instead he got the one that in the space of one game, a 20-32 loss to England in February 2019, went from always being able to find a way to win, to more often than not finding a way to lose.
There’s something about that jolt two years ago, the binary good/bad nature of the before and after, that’s left a scar only a win of real significance will start to heal.
Farrell has been fire fighting since the moment he took the job. His first Six Nations started off patchy and unfocused, then there was the gut-punch against England, then a pandemic and then this week his captain and only truly irreplaceable player was the central figure in a concussion debate that threatens to change the whole culture of the sport. That irreplaceable player is now out this weekend, and his two best forwards, James Ryan and Caelan Doris, have also been lost to concussion, his scrum half to injury and his primary enforcer to a ban.
Farrell’s route out of all this runs through that fault line at outhalf that has no short term fix, and the medium term fix feels too far off to be relevant. While the Sexton succession plan clearly needed to be expedited, starting Billy Burns and Jamison Gibson Park against the best defence in Europe is not the ideal testing ground.
That’s the backdrop for him as he prepares for the visit of the most talented, best coached French team in decades. Every big decision a coach makes is within the context of how secure his job is. At the moment the snakes look bigger, the ladders look smaller, so don’t be surprised if you see a risk averse game plan this weekend.
That clouds the reality, because a red card is just another – huge – mistake to go on the list.
Last Sunday, Ireland played the best 27 minutes of rugby of his now one-year reign as head coach and it’s instructive to look at why that happened. The purple patch came directly after the Peter O’Mahony red card (13th minute) and up to that point Ireland had kicked a lot and made numerous errors, including knock-ons by Herring and Earls, a soft penalty by O’Mahony, a basic obstruction in midfield and a blocked Sexton chip-kick.
From the red card onwards however they started to make things happen, especially Tadhg Beirne who made his first poach in the very next phase of play. James Lowe and Hugo Keenan started to run back at Wales, penetrating their defence and sparking some ambition in the rest of the team.
Conor Murray is a good example of the before and after. He kicked two of his first three possessions early on in the game, but after O’Mahony went off he made two half breaks of his own, set Lowe free on the left wing and visibly speeded up his delivery.
At the end of the half, Lowe even took a quick-tap penalty which for restrained Ireland is the absolute height of decadence. In fact the only significant mistakes from the 13th minute until half time were a Sexton high tackle and a Ringrose sliced clearance.
The shift in style and execution was down to the situation they found themselves in. When you go down to 14 men in the 13th minute against a decent opponent, the expectation is you will lose. The moment Wayne Barnes showed O’Mahony the red, Ireland went from favourites to rank outsiders, and they began to play like a team with nothing to lose. It suited them.
That mindset, allied to some clear thinking and real dynamism from Beirne, Van Der Flier, Henshaw, Henderson, Ringrose and Keenan, gave them a 6 point lead and all the momentum going in at half-time. They should have been feeling really good about themselves.
But during the break they had time to consider their new found status as contenders, and the focus shifted again. After the resumption the kicks once again came thick and fast and inaccurate. Sexton, Murray and Keenan all kicked twice each in the opening five minutes of the second half, each time going too long.
They invited pressure on themselves and invited Wales to take a foothold in the game Wales never looked like creating for themselves. Those six loose kicks, it should be noted, all came when Ireland were in good attacking positions.
Then in the 48th minute, after an avalanche of Irish errors, Wales scored a try through George North, the momentum was lost and Ireland didn’t return to those carefree ways of the first half until 10 minutes to go when they were already two scores (eight points) down.
A lot of the analysis since then has focused on the O’Mahony red card, with many pundits stating Ireland would have won at a canter if they’d had 15 men on the field for 80 minutes. But that clouds the reality because a red card is just another – huge – mistake to go on the list.
Ireland now go through patches in big games – for example against Japan and NZ in the World Cup, against England three times, against France last season, Wales in 2019 and again last week, where they put together a scarcely believable litany of errors. They beat themselves before the opposition even gets a chance to.
For proof that most of their current problems are to do with anxiety, often manifesting in the form of compound errors, take the simple act of a penalty kick to touch. At any level of the game, it’s considered a basic skill. Some go for more distance, but either way you cut your cloth to measure, make sure you bank the territory and possession you’ve just been offered.
Against New Zealand in the World Cup, Sexton missed two and his replacement Joey Carbery missed one. Last Sunday, Sexton again missed one and his replacement Billy Burns did the same. A good international team might expect to do that once every couple of seasons. That’s a decade worth of missed kicks in two games.
When you stand back from it the reality is Ireland have been, for a long time now, a twitchy, fragile group that’s one error away from a blunder party
Keith Earls is another good example of the mental capitulations that can strike any player in a green shirt. In the second half of his career he has been defined by how mentally secure he is, but there was a three minute period against Wales where he knocked on, gave away a penalty for tackling a player in the air and kicked out on the full, leading to Wales’ second try of the game.
Billy Burns spent five minutes throwing a blizzard of errors at his teammates, culminating in that missed kick to touch at the end. In 2019 Jacob Stockdale made three errors in the lead up to one New Zealand try. Against England last year the lineout was gutterball after gutterball.
When you stand back from it the reality is Ireland have been, for a long time now, a twitchy, fragile group that’s one error away from a blunder party. That’s Farrell’s biggest problem because all the other elements that go into a good display will be irrelevant until it’s sorted.
That result against Wales, for all the defiance on display, means Ireland are more likely to finish 5th (effectively last) than 1st.
Ireland are still doughty, however, they now have a scrum, a lineout and a maul again, and there are signs the attack is improving. In Porter, Beirne, Van Der Flier, Stander, Henshaw, Ringrose, Keenan and Lowe they have a group of players that look fit and in form and it’s worth remembering these players are all playing well at provinces that are winning most of the time.
In international rugby, however, it doesn’t matter how good your good moments and your good players are, if your bad moments are really bad. Wales were a steady, underwhelming 5/10 for most of the game, whereas Ireland were hitting 9/10 at times before a 1/10 moment throttled everything that went before.
To beat France, Ireland need to play like they did for those 27 minutes, and hope France don’t hit top gear. If Ireland kick badly to Dupont and Dulin, the scoreboard will get ugly because this is the best backline they have faced since New Zealand, the day they shipped 46 points.
Farrell is unlikely to be replaced as Ireland manager at the end of this campaign. He’s only a year in the job, his time working under Schmidt and with The Lions was largely successful, and he has hit par most of the time since taking over. The team is playing no worse than in 2019, and the appointment of Paul O’Connell as forwards coach shows he doesn’t think he has all the answers, a rare trait in modern coaches.
He’s also a good talker, comes across well to the media and his team are playing with passion and courage. With no fans in the grounds the IRFU have no spare cash to throw at a new coach anyway.
But Wales looked the most beatable team in the competition, bar Italy, and this season now has the potential to be Ireland’s worst since 1998. Farrell’s reputation, with the fans and his employers, is, for the moment, treading water. This game against France feels like a tie-breaker.
Simon Hick is a Second Captains producer
