IT WAS NOT until the Irish players had limped back to their dressing room, bruised, drained, but also relieved, that the scale of their achievement became clear. Aside from becoming the first Ireland team to win a series in the Southern Hemisphere, they had also managed to do something much more important. Earlier in the tour, Andy Farrell, their then defence coach, said he was curious to see what “the Irish ticker” was made of.
Well, now he knew. Two successive victories were Ireland’s first against the Wallabies on Australian soil since 1979, and just their fourth and fifth in all their visits to the place. Sitting in the privileged seats, the aristocracy of Australian rugby, John Eales and Mark Ella, peered at their team’s predicament, and wondered how so much could change since their playing days.
Yet the answer was simple. “Irish rugby now has depth,” explained Joe Schmidt afterwards.
If further proof was needed, on that autumnal Sydney evening, well it was visible on the scoreboard. Going into the decisive test of that Australian tour, Schmidt was afflicted by a similar set of circumstances as those that he encountered at the 2015 World Cup, when Ireland, for the sixth time in eight tournaments, exited at the quarter-final stage.
Three years on, things had seemingly changed. By the time Tadhg Beirne entered the fray on the final ten minutes of that tour to win his second cap, Schmidt was resorting to his ninth back-row choice.
And still they won.
“You are certainly building towards a situation where you can cope with injuries or setbacks,” Schmidt said that evening. He might have been Down Under but the coach was on top of the world.
Unbeknownst to him, as he spoke in the concrete corridor underneath the Sydney Football Ground’s main stand, Ross Byrne and Kieran Marmion quietly made their way to the team bus. Numbers 22 and 23 on the Ireland team-sheet that day, they were the respective back-ups to Johnny Sexton and Conor Murray and also the only players not to see any game-time.
Fast forward to today. Like Schmidt against Argentina in the 2015 quarter-final and like that final test of the 2018 tour, Andy Farrell is going into a make-or-break game without his captain (in his case Sexton), without two key members of his back row (O’Mahony and Caelan Doris), missing a key member of his backline (Jacob Stockdale), and his best lock forward, James Ryan.
On top of everything else, though, he doesn’t have Conor Murray, an issue Ireland have dealt with before – when Marmion successfully deputised for the Munster-man in the November 2018 victory over the All Blacks. Even so it is a problem he could have done without this weekend. “It’s an opportunity for someone else,” said Farrell.
Truthfully, though, there is a limit to how much a coach wants to learn, especially when it is France and especially when it is Antoine Dupont staring back at you.
While it is all well and good to have had the same half-back pairing since the Ice Age or thereabouts, you always knew the day would come when Ireland would have to prepare for a big game without their Murray/Sexton combo.
This is it. Jamison Gibson Park and Billy Burns have 10 caps and just three starts between them but now must navigate their way as Ireland stand at the crossroads of their season, facing the most improved team in the world.
After losing last week in Cardiff, you get the sense that Ireland are as capable of finishing this season with a 1-4 (wins/losses) record as they are of rattling off four straight wins.
And the guys who will carry the responsibility of reversing their decline have barely been tested. It’s a failure of planning and it goes back to that 2018 tour, when Byrne didn’t see a minute’s action, when Ulster-bound Burns didn’t even get on the plane. Time has been invested since in Jack Carty, Luke McGrath, Kieran Marmion and John Cooney. None of those players are in Sunday’s squad.
Nor, of course, is Joey Carbery, first injured in a World Cup warm-up against Wales in August 2019 before he was somehow bandaged together and brought to Japan, a risky decision at the time, one – in hindsight – that should never have been made.
“I’m not into looking back,” said Farrell today. “When you get bumps in the road, you just deal with what is front of you and you keep going. Obviously, we’ve lost a few players but we have others who have come in. Billy is one of those. He’s a resilient character.”
He has had to be. Pilloried for his misjudged kick in the endgame of last Sunday’s opener against Wales, Burns is in a similar place today that David Humphreys, Ronan O’Gara and Sexton all occupied at differing points in their international careers.
All three missed decisive kicks – Humphreys against France in a one-point defeat in ’99, O’Gara in New Zealand in ’02, Sexton blowing a Triple Crown against the Scots in 2010.
They must have felt the pressure the next time out; the dry mouth, the sweaty hands. They must have stood over a kick, either at goal or to touch, knowing their team depended on them nailing it, conscious that an audience of millions were watching from their homes, ready to deliver an opinion one way or another.
There isn’t a successful player in any sport who hasn’t suffered that kind of torture. The greats deal with it. “Rog,” said Shane Byrne, his former Ireland team mate, “wanted, in fact needed to be in a situation where he had to shoulder the responsibility of making the winning kick. He relished those moments. It was a part of him.”
We can’t yet say if Burns has a similar mentality. Only he knows. But by 5pm on Sunday the entire rugby world will be let in on the secret and no one will be anticipating the answer more than the man who has placed his trust in him: Andy Farrell.
Originally published at 16.23