THE LOSERS
Ireland
Let’s just get this over with: for all that it had the country enthralled, and for all of the gooier sentiments that you could rightly tether to it, Ireland’s World Cup campaign ended in failure.
This was — and remains — a truly excellent team which set an objective to win the tournament and fell well short of its own expectations. Andy Farrell’s side didn’t choke, nor did they even play especially badly against New Zealand in their quarter-final, but the record books will lay bare the truth that the best Ireland team we’ve seen didn’t get any further at a World Cup than seven weaker iterations before them.
To be clear, anybody who would refer to this Ireland team as ‘losers’ in a literal sense should probably be avoided in the pub. The reason why this one hurt so much is that they had become serial winners, and the margins between bowing out in the last eight and reaching a final were about as wide as Jordie Barrett’s leg.
That’s not to put their exit down to bad luck, either; there were elements of underperformance against the All Blacks that will follow members of this team for the rest of their days. At least a handful will never get the chance to put it right, either.
That’s just elite sport, isn’t it? In its own little bubble, the stakes are enormous and, consequently, the emotions hit us only in extremes. And sure as anything, there are still plenty of highs to come for Andy Farrell’s side and Irish rugby fans in the next few years.
France
See above, really — but crank up the levels of anguish by a notch or two.
Whereas the furthest back that Ireland or their fans would have begun to entertain the possibility that they could win a World Cup would have been about June 2022, the French had been dreaming of this tournament for the six years since they procured hosting rights.
Everything Fabien Galthié did from his arrival in 2019 onwards was geared towards France finally lifting Webb Ellis on home soil. But like Ireland, France failed their mission and will feel they’ve left slip their best ever opportunity to have their country inscribed on the trophy.
And as was the case with Ireland, the finality of Ben O’Keeffe’s full-time whistle in the quarter with South Africa two weeks ago, and the immediate sense of foolishness at having deigned to dream of a storybook ending, will be a feeling that no French player or supporter forgets until they actually win the bloody thing at some abstract point in the future.
Eddie Jones and Australia
Theirs was a very different kind of failure. That Eddie Jones made such a galactic hames of a tournament for which he promised so much is obviously funny. Less so was the sight of some of his especially wet-behind-the-ear Wallabies realising in real-time that they were the laughing stock of their nation as a weak Wales team all but funted them out of the competition at the earliest opportunity.
Whatever Wallaby fans feared the nadir for Australian rugby union may have been, Jones hopped in an excavator and steered his national team to unimaginable depths at record speed.
Rugby union in Australia is in serious trouble ahead of a commercially pivotal Lions tour in 2025 and a World Cup in 2027.
In truth, it’s hard to imagine that Lions test series being remotely competitive which, by extension, could easily sound the death knell for the concept as a whole. An Aussie public consequentially disengaged from a home World Cup a couple of years later would spell trouble for World Rugby, too, not least from a financial perspective.
As for Jones: he’s absolutely flamed out of his last two jobs and the evidence would increasingly suggest that his time as a serious coach at this level is up. That very suspicion will drive him to take on another big job, but it might have already driven him a bit too mad for that job to work out.
Italy
They were saddled with an awful draw but relative to performance expectations, this Italian campaign was like Ireland 2007 after 14 pints of Peroni.
It’s a shame that Kieran Crowley’s reign — which encompassed relatively recent, famous wins away to Wales and at home to Dave Rennie’s Australia — ended with Italy looking pretty much indistinguishable from Namibia when they took on the All Blacks and France.
This Italian side is, of course, better than it showed in Pool A, but the scars of those two huge defeats will be such that Gonzalo Quesada will begin his head-coaching stint from a lower floor than his recent predecessors.
Georgia
Particularly in light of Italy’s struggles, this tournament felt like a missed opportunity for Georgia to shove down the throats of World Rugby the point that they’ve rightly been making for the last few years: that they deserve more tests against Tier 1 opposition.
Instead, the Tier 2 poster boys finished winless and bottom of a pool containing Portugal, who had finished second behind them in this year’s Rugby Europe Championship.
It feels like a cruel way to frame a tournament in which the ‘Lelos’ were at least semi-competitive in every game but, when push came to shove, the six-in-a-row champions of Europe’s second-tier competition were outshone in their pool — and very nearly outdone in Toulouse — by the Portuguese ‘Lobos’.
After an impressive three-year stint, head coach Levan Maisashvili has resigned from his national-team position as well as his role with Georgia’s first professional franchise, Black Lion, who will compete for the first time in the Challenge Cup this term.
Maisashvili, who had a massive health scare with Covid in 2021, won’t struggle for work if or when he goes looking for it.
THE WINNERS
South Africa
The back-to-back ‘Boks are now the undisputed kings of world rugby having won four of the 10 World Cups since 1987.
Rassie Erasmus and Jacques Nienaber have proven themselves as the game’s greatest thinkers and so too have their players, whose run of three consecutive one-point wins in the knockout stages encapsulates their mental toughness.
However frustrating it might be for us, it’s fitting that the ‘Boks and their fans have commandeered ‘Zombie’ from their Irish equivalents, because they spend more time in other people’s heads than any other team in rugby.
The most talked-about team and arguably the most interesting team are now definitely the best team. And they’re the best team partly because they have more players who are among the top two or three in the world at their position than anyone else. And also partly because their defence is perhaps the greatest we’ve seen in any era.
Had a chance to breakdown one of the best defensive displays I have ever seen for @RTEsport this week on #againstthehead . Can’t wait to see what Jacques Nienaber does with the Leinster Defence #RWC23Final pic.twitter.com/dzPmRavq96
— Bernard Jackman (@bernardjackman) November 1, 2023
The fact that Ireland were able to edge them in the pool just goes to show that… Ah, let’s not, actually.
Scott Robertson
That the All Blacks fell marginally short in last Saturday’s showpiece will make their new head coach’s job a fraction easier.
Robertson faces a significant rebuild with several of Ian Foster’s squad heading either for pastures anew or off into the sunset.
He is also staring into the most difficult era in New Zealand’s rugby history, with the conveyor belt of talent having been slowed by the decline of Super Rugby, the growth of rugby league on Kiwi soil, and the reality that rugby union’s monopoly on Pacific Island talent has been ended by the expansion of both league and AFL scouting networks to Fiji, Samoa and Tonga.
But at least Robertson won’t find himself steering the reigning world champions through what will undoubtedly be a period of transition between now and Australia 2027.
Steve Borthwick and England
The speed with which they got their you-know-what together made England one of the surprise packages of the tournament, really. Considering the ebb from which they began their campaign, reaching a semi-final — and particularly pushing South Africa to the very brink in that semi-final — can be deemed a serious success.
Their whole tournament laid bare the distinction between the uncomfortable, bumbling Steve Borthwick that we [used to] see at press conferences and the highly competent rugby nerd of whom players at both Leicester and England have always spoken so highly.
Not that the construction of England’s gameplan required any real level of genius, but Borthwick and his ticket deserve credit for both their planning and execution: ultimately, when it mattered, they produced the most effective England team we’ve seen in four years.
It wasn’t quite enough to upset the Springboks but, with the impending addition of Felix Jones and a couple of additional strings to their bow, it may be that our days of being able to laugh at England for being a strangely bad rugby team are finally over.
Bundee Aki
It’ll mean little to him at the moment but rarely has a player’s reputation been so profoundly enhanced in such a short space of time as Aki’s was in France.
Connacht’s star man began the 2022/23 club season outside of Andy Friend’s immediate plans and ended the international season as one of four players nominated for World Player of the Year.
In between, Aki became one of several standouts in Ireland’s Grand Slam campaign but he took his overall game to an unprecedented level when it mattered most.
In France, he became Ireland’s star man. Against South Africa, his lung-bursting first-half line-break felt catalytic. That charge into ‘Bok real estate amounted to most of his 66 metres gained that night but with 14 carries, Aki was every bit the thorn in South Africa’s side that Damian De Allende was in Ireland’s.
He laid waste to the Scottish midfield a couple of weeks later and led the backs with 12 tackles.
Against the All-Blacks, when the proverbial had already hit the fan, it was Aki who exhibited the composure needed to drag Ireland back into the game with an artistic, dynamic finish, his fifth try overall. He made 20 total carries in that quarter-final for just shy of 70 metres.
A lot of Ireland fans’ fonder memories from the tournament will feature Bundee Aki in some way, shape or form.
Fiji
Simon Raiwalui’s Flying Fijians reached their first quarter-final since 2007 and yet there’s a gnawing sense that had their star out-half Caleb Muntz been available, they might have gone even further.
Still, their pool progression — and, indeed, their evident progress across the board — will be enough for them to seal top-tier status in the newly formed Nations Championship from 2026.
Entry to the Rugby Championship feels like an inevitability down the line, too. And while they must first appoint a successor to Raiwalui, who knows what Fiji might be capable of in Australia after four more years of drastically improved rugby infrastructure?
Consider this campaign a pretty strong foundation on which Fiji can build towards challenging for serious trophies in the medium-term future.
Portugal
When Patrice Lagisquet’s Portugal returned home from France, you could have been forgiven for mistaking the scenes at Lisbon Airport for a glorious homecoming for Benfica or Sporting CP on the back of winning a European trophy.
❤️❤️❤️ pic.twitter.com/R2RqmM39wg
— Francisco Isaac (@francisaac87) October 10, 2023
Even in advance of the tournament, the word on the street was that Portugal would ruffle a few feathers. By all accounts, they ran two or three tries past Ireland in the sides’ behind-closed-doors pre-tournament friendly in the Algarve and, based on their output during the competition proper, those accounts can now probably be taken at face value.
Head coach Lagisquet stepped away last month as the coach who led Portugal to their first ever Rugby World Cup victory, an all-time great shock of quarter-finalists Fiji no less. His side genuinely captured the imagination of a football-mad nation and the tournament’s legacy on Portuguese soil will be immeasurable.
A competent world governing body would work to harness such a groundswell of interest on a new frontier. It would use this electrifying Portuguese team as an emblem for rugby’s capacity to captivate new audiences, to become a part of the sporting conversation even in non-traditional countries.
So, I guess we’ll see you in four years, Portugal. Thanks for everything.
Leinster
Bear with me.
But for the eastern province to be able to replace a coach of Stuart Lancaster’s standing with another who has won back-to-back World Cups is scarcely believable.
Twice in a row, Jacques Nienaber has been integral to his country going the whole way in international rugby’s most difficult competition. Also twice in a row, Leinster have fallen at the final hurdle of their equivalent competition.
Nienaber would have been a superb hire even if his ‘Boks had fallen at the quarters this time around but instead he’ll arrive in Dublin reeking of success. And success always has a smell of more off it.
Leinster Rugby, already a highly functioning operation, doesn’t require ‘transformation’. But it’s hard to imagine a world in which Nienaber’s influence on the province isn’t profound.
Eddie Jones, again
Ah, he’ll probably still land on his feet in Japan, won’t he?
