IN A CORRIDOR outside one of the dressing rooms at the IRFU’s High Performance Centre in Abbotstown about three weeks ago, Ross Byrne sat back on a bench, cool as a breeze.
Standing around him was what whatever the collective noun is for a group of sports journalists — probably a plague, in Byrne’s language — one of whom asked if his winning kick against Australia had felt to him like as much of a turning point in his Ireland career as it had to everyone else.
Arms folded, brow raised, Byrne replied: “It was probably a turning point for all of you.” Cue laughter. It grew louder as the plague of journalists realised that the Leinster and Ireland out-half was laughing along with them.
Leinster and Ireland. He would have always had his 13 previous caps but even Byrne himself has recently acknowledged that there were times over the last couple of years in which he felt he might not get a chance to add to them.
It’s totally understandable that Byrne would poke fun at the Irish rugby media: since the 2019 World Cup, there have been innumerable column inches, radio segments, podcast chats and visual analysis pieces dedicated to the national team’s no. 22 jersey; for literal years, Ireland’s prospective success or failure in France this autumn has been widely accepted to hinge on the ability of its occupant to pick up wherever Johnny Sexton leaves off in the event that the captain becomes incapacitated. And far more often than not, Byrne was not the man that people had in mind.
But in defence of, well, virtually everybody, how could he have been? It’s less than a handful of months since Byrne was somewhere between fourth and sixth in Andy Farrell’s out-half depth chart, and the Ireland head coach knows a lot more about the players available to him than any of us who see them perform only on Saturdays.
As recently as November, Ciarán Frawley had emerged as the most realistic challenger to Joey Carbery for the role of Ireland’s backup 10. Harry Byrne — albeit more so with an eye to the future — had consistently been selected ahead of his older brother as one of Ireland’s three out-halves. When the Wallabies came to town and Ireland, already without Carbery and Frawley, lost Sexton at the 11th hour, the game became a baptism of fire for Jack Crowley, who literally wore the skipper’s jersey as he performed capably at the wheel in his first international start.
But having boarded the ship only days before the final November test, it was Ross Byrne who sailed the ball between the sticks and steered Ireland home.
As minds naturally strayed towards the World Cup a year out, it was the most timely reminder to those who needed one that, at the very least, Byrne was a man upon whom you could depend with the ball on the tee and the game on the line. Andy Farrell would have suspected that anyway, but it can’t have hurt that he saw first-hand evidence of it in the dying minutes of a high-intensity test.
But while that moment against Australia felt like a jump-start for Byrne’s Ireland career, it would do him a disservice to attribute too much to it: for one thing, even during the times in which he wasn’t involved with Ireland over the last couple of years, Byrne had an ongoing line of dialogue with Farrell who would assign to him various means of tweaking his game so as to meet the needs of Ireland’s attack.
It’s not a coincidence that Byrne now plays flatter to the line when it makes sense or that, even more pertinently, he’s become significantly better at identifying half-gaps in the line through which he can send his teammates. He has actively worked on these elements of his game with Leinster’s coaches this season and he is simply a better player now than he ever has been before.
In fact, he’s a better player now than he was even in November. Back then, he was reliant on the chips falling in his favour to be brought back in from the cold with only days remaining in Ireland’s autumn series. By Ireland’s Six Nations squad announcement two months later, Byrne had overtaken Carbery in Farrell’s immediate plans and he has since beaten Crowley to the backup 10 berth.
He impressed off the bench against a beaten Wales but, if there remained any lingering doubters after Cardiff, Byrne can point them in the direction of his 32 minutes against France as evidence that they’re looking for issues that don’t really exist.
Remarkably, Saturday’s start against Italy — only Byrne’s third ever for Ireland — could see him consolidate his grip on a matchday jersey as far as the World Cup for the simple fact that there are only four games between full-time in Rome and first whistle in Bordeaux against Romania, and Sexton is likely to start in at least two of them.
Joey Carbery, who showed glimpses of his best in Munster’s destruction of the Ospreys, can use Byrne’s international rebirth as a case study in how to turn the tables once more before the end of the season, granted.
But four months after he was initially omitted from Ireland’s November squad, a place in Farrell’s first-choice 23 is now Byrne’s to lose.
Three years of earnest discourse and debate around succession planning, test-match exposure, ‘x-factor’ and whatever else — and Ireland’s current backup 10 is on the brink of proving it to have been mostly nonsense.
If that’s how it turns out in the end, Ross Byrne more than deserves the last laugh.