A LITTLE OVER three weeks out from Ireland’s opening World Cup warm-up match, the IRFU’s High Performance Centre is a hive of activity, with players milling through the corridors, a film crew unpacking their equipment and music booming from the gym.
The Grand Slam champions will step up their World Cup preparations when they face Italy in Dublin on 5 August, but have been tipping away out in Abbotstown for a month already, working under a two weeks on, one week off routine. Or, to be more precise, two weeks on, one week away.
“The week off, it’s not a week off,” explains Iain Henderson. “It’s a week not in camp. We go away, everyone has their GPS units with them. We go back to our gyms and almost everyone, we split off into… The guys in Ulster, we train together and stay at home, a handful of guys from Leinster and Munster were out in Portugal so they trained out there together.
“So you kind of break off and train in small groups, albeit getting what feels like a week off in terms of mental refreshment. It feels good… Those intense blocks in two weeks, we’re in Monday to Friday the entire time and you can definitely see us implementing the fix-ups we’ve highlighted.”
This more holistic approach to camp has been in the works for some time, with Andy Farrell and his staff consulting the players in a bid to design an effective, yet enjoyable summer training plan.
Henderson thinks back to the summer of 2019, when Joe Schmidt’s Ireland shipped 57 points against England before falling flat at the Japan World Cup. Four years down the line, Ireland’s summer training camp has a very different look and feel to it.
“Yeah, it feels very different. We’ve started rugby a lot earlier. We went away from, there was a lot of running in the last World Cup, by running I mean like non-rugby-related-conditioning running. I feel like we’re getting a lot of our conditioning from a rugby environment, on the pitch or down there on the artificial pitch so there’s all those elements.
It feels shorter this time and the blocs of work that we’re doing feel way more intense. It’s more concentrated and we feel like we’re getting real buy-in for a short period of time and then we’re seeing massive improvements.
“The last time (2019) it felt more elongated, like a staged build-up to it. It feels like the squad is in a good place and that if we had to play this weekend we could.
“It definitely feels we’re a lot more about rugby. I know that sounds silly but there’s a huge emphasis on rugby and being the best rugby team we can rather than being the best team in the gym or the best team on the pitch.
“Yes, obviously those things are – doing broncos or whatever – yes you have to be fit and yes you have to be strong but we feel like we’ve got a really good balance of doing both of those, not making it the most difficult pre-season physically just for the sake of it, to try and blow people out, to try and ruin people, to try and mentally strengthen people that way.
“But, at the same time, with what we’re doing there’s a fair bit of fatigue, they’re long days as you’re seeing here today. We’ve been here since seven this morning, so we’re being put through our paces and it’s very mentally stressful – not stressful, taxing – but at the same time when it comes around to working hard we work hard physically in the gym and on the pitch as well.”
As the top ranked side in the world, Ireland will head to France with ambitions of not only reaching the semi-final stages for the first time, but going on to win the tournament outright. To do that, they’ll need to build on the gameplan that has served them so well over the last 12 months, a period which has seen the group record a series win in New Zealand, beat South Africa and Australia during the autumn window and capture a brilliant Grand Slam earlier this year.
“We’ve talked a fair but this week around our defence,” Henderson continues.
“We’ve seen in the last number of campaigns that our attack has been able to break some teams down but our defence probably hasn’t been something that you’d talk… You wouldn’t look at Ireland and say, ‘they really turn teams over, they are really strong in defence’.
I think that’s something that we have been looking at and make a point of difference and work on that.
At the same time not neglecting the work that has to go into an attacking game too and ensure we are not taking that side of the game for granted, because that is a constant work-on for everyone throughout the squad to stay on top of.”
The Ulster lock, who recently signed a two-year extension to his IRFU contract, is preparing for his third World Cup, having featured in all five of Ireland’s games at the 2019 tournament and four times at the 2015 World Cup.
He feels the game has continued to evolve since 2019, moving toward a style more suited to the way Ireland now look to play.
“In my head you see a lot of the top end teams trying to keep the ball in play more, upping the speed of the game, forwards coming around the corner more. The one that pops into your head is Josh van der Flier coming around the corner and then increasing the tempo doing that, increasing the tempo to find space rather than running specific lines to find space.
“If you run it down more than that, to be honest, I haven’t really sat down and compared recent campaigns to the 2019 World Cup but I do feel that, in my head, you see teams separate themselves with the maul a lot more now. Obviously South Africa started to do it then. In my head they won the World Cup off the back of their maul and then a lot of teams (started) taking that (into their own game).
“It will be intriguing to see how that works out this World Cup. Maul defences have become so good. Going back a handful of Six Nations ago, there were very few maul tries scored and you don’t see them as often at the very top level, maybe at the club game.”
Iain Henderson was speaking at the launch of Canterbury’s Ireland Rugby World Cup jerseys which will be worn by the Irish team in France this autumn. The jerseys are on sale now at Canterbury.com, and via Intersports Elverys, in store and on Elverys.ie.
The 42 is on Instagram! Tap the button below on your phone to follow us!
