THE JOKES HAVE been unavoidable. The ones about an Ireland international playing in a World Cup final.
There is an Irishman with a World Cup winner’s medal already and he’s part of the Springboks set-up too. Assistant coach Felix Jones helped them to their 2019 victory and hopes to conclude his time with the South Africans with a second medal tomorrow night.
Technically speaking, Jean Kleyn will indeed become the first Ireland international to actually play in a World Cup final, albeit for South Africa.
The Munster lock has been on a whirlwind journey this year. Kleyn and his wife had their first child in February, having just built their home in Limerick. He helped Munster to break their trophy drought in May and then would have hoped Andy Farrell finally called him up to his Ireland squad.
It wasn’t to be, but Kleyn’s World Cup ambitions didn’t end there. Instead, it was Rassie Erasmus who gave him a shout and invited him into the Springboks set-up. Kleyn didn’t think twice and launched the second chapter of his Test career thanks to World Rugby’s eligibility laws allowing him to switch allegiance to his native land.
Kleyn has taken his chance since accepting Erasmus’ offer and he already has one cap more than he earned for Ireland. Now, he is on the brink of earning a World Cup winner’s medal, having been named as part of the Springboks’ 7/1 bench split against New Zealand tomorrow.
It’s remarkable stuff for a player who didn’t even see a career in professional rugby for himself when he was in his late teens. He wasn’t on the radar at all but forced his way into the pro game through his gritty performances at Stellenbosch University.
Even by the time he was playing for Western Province, he was still self-admittedly raw and had poor handling skills, but he was a big brute of an enforcer. Erasmus watched him breaking through and when he moved to Munster, he convinced Kleyn to switch to Irish rugby too.
As it transpired, Erasmus was Kleyn’s head coach only for a few months before departing back home for the Springboks job.
With a long queue of excellent locks ahead of him in South Africa, the prospect of being a ‘project player’ in Ireland was alluring and Kleyn duly served his three-year residency period before being included in Ireland’s 2019 World Cup squad. His selection drew lots of criticism from supporters and media, in large part because the popular Devin Toner had been left out of the squad.
While it was a proud achievement for Kleyn to be involved, it was also a tough time for him as he received lots of social media abuse. He had very mixed feelings about that campaign, which was a disappointing one for Ireland collectively.
Andy Farrell took over from Joe Schmidt after the World Cup and he has never included Kleyn in a squad since. The Munster lock’s form was consistent but it wasn’t until the last two seasons that the calls for him to be included really became prominent. Kleyn was arguably Munster’s player of the season as they won the URC in May.
Farrell and Ireland forwards coach Paul O’Connell continued to prefer other options, with their frontline trio of locks – James Ryan, Tadhg Beirne, and Iain Henderson – supplemented Joe McCarthy and Kieran Treadwell in this summer’s World Cup training squad, while Ryan Baird also has second row experience even if he wasn’t used there in this campaign.
Treadwell was eventually cut from the squad as Farrell settled on his final World Cup selection, but many Munster fans felt Ireland were missing a trick by opting against including Kleyn.
Erasmus clearly felt the same. He never could have imagined that he’d be able to call Kleyn up after watching him debut for Ireland in 2019. In fact, SA Rugby voted against the change in eligibility law that allowed him to do so in the end.
Erasmus had known Kleyn for well over a decade, had signed him for Munster, and now saw an opening for him in the Boks squad. Even in a country that produces lots of big, tough second rows, Erasmus felt his group needed another traditional tighthead lock like Kleyn, all the more so because he was hatching his 7/1 bench plan.
Kleyn was one of the seven forwards when the Boks first unveiled it before the World Cup, he featured as part of the same bench split against Ireland in the pool stages, and now he’s involved for the final against the All Blacks.
Tomorrow, Kleyn hopes to cap this remarkable adventure with a World Cup winner’s medal, something that seemed impossible to him only a few months ago.
Kleyn is contracted to Munster until the end of this season and it remains to be seen if his status as a non-Irish-qualified player has any implications to the province’s presumable desire to re-contract him given that he has been such a key player.
Alongside him on the bench tomorrow will be fellow Munster man RG Snyman, capping his journey from the depths of injury despair, and they will have plenty of support from Ireland.
