Gavin Cooney

REGULAR READERS WILL know this column is no citizen of Rugby Country: we barely qualify for non-immigrant visa status. 

But that doesn’t stop us looking over at our brothers in muscular Christianity from here in Football Country, and now, for the first time, we are seeing the similarities.

Who knew Rugby Country were as open as we are to reacting to bruising defeats with grand existential inquisitions on structures and pathways and governance? To now, we had viewed Ireland’s rugby/football dynamic as that of the blithely satisfied imperial power versus the neurotic and insecure subject on its margins; they were Homer Simpson and we were Frank Grimes. 

And yet the Six Nations defeat to France has suddenly lurched Irish rugby into a frenzy of extreme introspection. RTÉ’s Against the Head hosted a lengthy discussion on the parching of the talent wellspring, and these discussions have been echoed on podcasts and radio shows all week.

It has all been very interesting stuff, and there’s no doubt there is much of importance to note for the provinces and the IRFU, especially with respect to reclaiming the chunk of land that seems to have fallen into the sea which the ancient cartographers of Rugby Country tell me was once called “Munster”.  

But while this column is no expert in rugby, as a veteran of Irish football misery years against Denmark, Wales, Luxembourg, Azerbaijan and Armenia, we are qualified to advise on all matters of existential despair.

And Irish rugby’s state of the nation review feels to us like living the Mel Gibson/Jesus meme. It strikes us as a bit of an overreaction.

Granted, the Irish rugby team are very clearly on a slide now, given they’ve dropped out of the top three in the world for the first time in four years and are on a lengthy streak of being beaten up by the game’s traditional heavyweights.

But is Ireland’s demotion from the very top tier of the game really an indictment of all they are doing? Or is it merely the restoration of a natural order that Ireland had miraculously resisted for much longer than anyone could think was reasonable? 

The bad news, first of all, is that it seems that much of the rest of the world has caught up to the edge Ireland gained on being an early adopter of building club teams through the prism of the national team: now the French and the English seem to have belatedly come around to the notion that their clubs need not be in eternal conflict with their unions.

It’s hardly the IRFU’s fault that their competitors have mimicked one of their better ideas, but it is an undoubted blow to our prospects that the top nations have lately been firing fewer bullets into their own feet. 

Also, take the lesson from a football country who effectively got bored listening to Martin O’Neill lament the retirement of Robbie Keane. In any rush to the root and branch, we always underrate the exit of the generational player.

There may never have been an Irish rugby player as great as Johnny Sexton, but certainly there has never been any player so important, given that the team’s tactical approach, basic standards and, in fact, whole identity seems to have been housed entirely in his head.

There has been much faffing around in trying to find Sexton’s successor in the team, and much retrospective criticism for failing to better manage the succession plan, but while Sexton’s team was the kind of centralised bureaucracy against which the denizens of Rugby Country would shriek and vote against, it was absolutely the correct call to achieving success on the pitch. When you have that kind of talent in sport, you have to squeeze it for all it’s worth. 

Plus, from this vantage point, the fallout from the France game has ignored some low-hanging fruit, most obviously the admission from the head coach that the Ireland players lacked “intent” from the off. This has subsequently been rationalised by the Irish coach John Fogarty as a matter of perhaps errant priorities, that they had spent so long drilling the detailed tactical stuff they neglected the reminders to be physical.

The deep-dive analyses risks failing to critique this nonsense. How is it the coaching team’s job to tell a rugby team to be physical? Accuse us of naivety from our vantage point over here, but we thought physicality in rugby was like the water in which fish swim. These comments from Fogarty are of a driving instructor saying he regretted spending so long teaching a learner driver how to do a hill start that he didn’t have time to mention they’d also need to start the ignition to pass their test. 

A final message from your laureates in root-and-branch analyses: the truly scary thing is they spring from optimism, rather than pessimism. Irish football has spent years talking like this under the belief that we merely need to do X, Y, and Z to be happy once again. Irish rugby must reckon with the possibility that these last few heady years are not solely the product of decisions made by Irish rugby, but were partly a confluence of a few one-off talents and torpid, complacent rivals. To put it in your language: maybe there are fewer controllables to control. 

Now, don’t take this as an argument that Irish rugby is perfect and there is no point in even trying to improve. Irish rugby is doing some things well while there are plenty of other things they could be doing better.  So, things can be better and things should be better. But is a small nation drawing from a tiny player base losing to South Africa, New Zealand and France really the stuff to spread existential despair? We say no. 

Unless, obviously, you lose to Scotland. 

In that scenario our communiqué to Rugby Country would be: yes, it is indeed time to panic.