This week Andy Farrell explained the IRFU’s philosophy on handing out central contracts. 

“Just because somebody pops up and plays four or five games that are really good, as far as international rugby is concerned it’s about consistency at this level to prove your worth. I suppose that’s how we’ve always worked and how we’ll continue to,” Farrell said.  

He’s talking about contracts but it could be applied to the way Irish rugby conducts itself on and off the field of play, which is to take the sensible option, but to not look into the opportunity cost of taking that option.

The big name players being offered central contracts this month include Johnny Sexton, Keith Earls, Peter O’Mahony and Cian Healy, all highly decorated legends of Irish rugby, all close to the end of their careers. Rewarding those who have consistently delivered over the past decade is solid logic if you’re talking about a long term investment portfolio, but unfortunately, professional rugby players aren’t government bonds.

And the debate isn’t about whether Sexton, Earls, Healy, O’Mahony and other legends in their 30s deserve or don’t deserve new deals, because all things being equal, they do. The pertinent issue though is that these big money deals are of course a finite resource (the CVC deal will bring in €56 million for the IRFU but they will be down around €70 million in revenue by the end of this year due to the pandemic) so by including a group of players in their 30s, you’re going to have to exclude a raft of players in their 20s. 

This also applies to our plodding approach to capping promising young players. The four youngest starting out halves in the history of the Six Nations are Mathieu Jalibert (19), Romain Ntamack (19), Owen Farrell (20) and Danny Cipriani (20) all who have had or are having brilliant careers, yet there was outcry at the idea of Harry Byrne (21) being on the bench against the Washington Generals (Italy) because he had yet to hit all his “milestones”. It’s not that Harry Byrne is definitely the answer or at the level of Farrell and Ntamack, the issue is the flawed reasoning for not giving him a go. 

Meanwhile Wales are getting game-breaking, penalty-converting, try-scoring performances out of New Kids On The Block Kieran Hardy, Louis Rees Zammit, and Callum Sheedy. New Zealand and Australia routinely give players caps as soon as it’s obvious they have the required raw materials. Coaches in the southern hemisphere don’t wait for the perfect moment to give debuts because they know there is no sweet spot for this sort of thing.

Back in 2000 it was obvious to Warren Gatland, based on club form but reportedly more so on a few training sessions in camp, that Ronan O’Gara, Peter Stringer, Shane Horgan, Simon Easterby and John Hayes were all ready for international rugby and so all five made their debuts, helping Ireland win 44-22 to secure the country’s first win over the Scots since 1988. The boldness of that selection fed into how the team played on the day, and all those players went on to be central figures in the emergence of Ireland as a force in international rugby.

It’s all part of this national focus on what could go wrong, instead of focusing on what could go right. If that’s your way of looking at things, then you will always find something that might go wrong.

There should always be, in any professional set up, an emphasis on getting fresh faces into a squad. It doesn’t have to be forced or reckless, but it should be part of the culture to trust young talent. 

Yes they might be more error prone for their first few games but they bring enthusiasm, energy, speed, fitness, and they don’t have the physical and mental scar tissue that comes with injuries, contract talks, rejection and failure.

It’s all part of this national focus on what could go wrong, instead of focusing on what could go right. If that’s your way of looking at things, then you will always find something that might go wrong.

Rob Kearney’s oft stated philosophy is that the primary job of a fullback is to make no mistakes. He had a remarkably low error count and it served him and Ireland well, but you’d like to know what Stuart Hogg, Liam Williams, Jason Robinson, Ben Smith, Christian Cullen, Geordan Murphy, Serge Blanco or any of the other great attacking fullbacks over the years think of that safety first approach. You can build a philosophy around your own team’s strengths and weaknesses, and over time you can become a prisoner to that philosophy.

Poles apart

There are two on-field tactics, the box kick and the offload, that have come to represent the North and South pole of Ireland’s risk-reward analysis. When a team opts to box kick nothing too terrible can go wrong, and nothing too exciting can happen either. It’s rugby milquetoast, and Ireland have been its biggest fan.

But what it doesn’t allow for is the impact this tactic has on adrenaline, confidence and energy levels. There’s no way Keith Earls wants to repeatedly chase kicks through a thicket of opposition elbows, to then try and out jump someone taller, with more momentum and more support.

It’s slow death as the forwards slowly elongate the ruck and the scrum half slowly widens his stance and the winger slowly gets into 100m sprinter position. You can sense the joy draining from the crowd. Its second only to a series of re-set scrums for sucking out the atmosphere, but put Earls or Larmour in a position to run at someone, one on one, and see how their confidence levels fare after that. That’s the opportunity cost.

The offload, meanwhile, has clearly been too rich for our palette. Before the Italy game, Ireland had thrown one offload every 54 times they had possession of the ball, the lowest of any team in the Six Nations. And offloading against Italy doesn’t really count as a risk because that would suggest there was some jeopardy involved when playing them. You have to try it when the result is on the line.

Offloading isn’t the solution to all our or any team’s problems, and it looks like Farrell intends to have it as part of our arsenal in the future, but the fact that its only now (hopefully) being brought into our game is madness. It should be viewed as bread and butter, not some exotic creature to be observed from afar.

Photo: Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile

Finn Russell will go a long way to deciding the result on Sunday. He likes to roll the dice and he does it too often, but whatever you think of him as a player, it’s his gunslinging ways more than anything that have earned him a big contract at a big club and a good shot at being a GB & Ireland Lion. In fact the policy at Racing 92 seems to be to employ and empower players who think along similar lines – Simon Zebo, Teddy Iribaren, Teddy Thomas, and Virimi Vakatawa – and it has won them a French title, got them to a Champions Cup final and made them arguably the most watchable team in Europe.

When Joe Schmidt first arrived at Leinster he told players who were good at something to get really good at it. Latch on the affirmative, don’t mess with mister-in-between. 

The underlying message still applies; the truly risky thing to do is to think too much about what you can’t do. Every player and every team have flaws, but if you inflict your strengths on the opposition then your flaws won’t be as relevant. New Zealand are not a brilliant defensive team, but the opposition spend most of their time dealing with what’s being thrown at them so the defence becomes less of an issue.

Ireland don’t need to become the Barbarians, or even France, overnight, but they need to start recognising what they’re missing out on when they choose to play it safe.

You can sense from what Sexton is saying this week that they want and need to push in this direction. The will is strong but so far the flesh has remained weak. The devil on their shoulder is telling them they can bash Scotland up and get the win, just like they always do. And maybe they can. But to play a style that could beat France or England, that takes another kind of courage, especially when you’re on a bad streak. 

We are a full two and a half years out from a World Cup and we play Scotland, in a Six Nations we can’t win. When, if not now, do we take the plunge?

Simon Hick is a Second Captains producer