OF THE 18 Ireland players preparing to head to their first Rugby World Cup, a 31-year-old who won his first Test cap back in 2016 perhaps faced the most anxious wait ahead of last Sunday’s squad announcement.
Stuart McCloskey recently admitted that when he missed out on Ireland’s summer tour to New Zealand last year, he feared his international career was over, having seen Ciarán Frawley and James Hume join Robbie Henshaw, Garry Ringrose and Bundee Aki as the five travelling centres.
One year on, the Ulster player is preparing to head to the biggest show in town on the back of his strongest season in the green jersey.
The opportunity to represent Ireland at a World Cup will have felt a long time coming for a player who has earned his shot after spending most of his career on the fringes of the squad. He’s even surprised himself a couple of times along the way.
McCloskey was more interested in football growing up and didn’t show much interest in rugby until his first year at Bangor Grammar School. Even then, McCloskey tended to reach for his golf clubs ahead of his boots.
The Down man wasn’t quite a star at schools level and went through those formative years without making a single age-grade representative side. Having a played a bit at scrum-half and out-half, he began to fill out, and slowly, a new future opened up for him.
After leaving school he joined Dungannon RFC and his performances at AIL level earned him a place in the Ulster sub-Academy, joining the province’s underage set-up at 20. One year later he debuted for the province and ended the season (2013/14) as Ulster’s Academy Player of the Year. That same year he was part of an Emerging Ireland panel that won the IRB Nations Cup in Romania. The following season he broke into the Ulster midfield and has been a mainstay of the team ever since.
It didn’t take long for full international honours to follow.
McCloskey was first capped as a 23-year-old during the 2016 Six Nations by Joe Schmidt, playing the opening 64 minutes of a 21-10 defeat at Twickenham. It would be his only Test appearance of the year as McCloskey was then overlooked for both the summer tour to South Africa and the autumn internationals, to some surprise.
It was a feeling he’d soon get used to as McCloskey struggled to impress Schmidt, who staggered his next two caps across the summers of 2017 (v Fiji) and 2018 (v USA).
After wearing the green jersey just three times across four years, McCloskey never really looked in the picture for a place at the 2019 World Cup in Japan.
“Maybe I just wasn’t for him (Schmidt)… That’s what it always was,” McCloskey said later that year. “Sometimes a coach just sticks to what he knows.”
Schmidt’s exit post-Japan, and the appointment of Andy Farrell as his replacement, represented a clean slate. When the Englishman gathered a group of 45-players for his first mini-camp in charge that Christmas, McCloskey’s name was on the list.
Still, he had to remain patient as Henshaw and Aki remained the leading options for the 12 shirt.
Cap number four finally arrived in the autumn win against Georgia in 2020 and since then, McCloskey has added 10 more international appearances, with the 2022-23 campaign marking his real breakthrough with Ireland.
As it happened, his big chance came just months after his omission from the summer tour to New Zealand left the player wondering if his Ireland career was over for good.
Yet as Ireland headed into the November Test window McCloskey’s form with Ulster had kept him in the mix and finally, fortune appeared to have fallen his way. Having been named on the bench for the opening autumn game against the Springboks, a late injury for Henshaw saw McCloskey bumped up to the starting team for his first cap against a traditional ‘Tier 1′ team in six-and-a-half years.
On the eve of the game, Ireland coach Paul O’Connell commended McCloskey’s attitude across what had been a difficult few years.
“Stuart has had some tough days where he has been up here training and a coach has had to have a conversation with him before the team is announced, and that has happened an awful lot,” O’Connell said.
“He’s always stuck with it and seems to be getting better and better and better as a player and never disheartened.”
He remained in camp for the summer warm-up games and as Ireland’s squad began to look increasingly settled as the summer wore on, there was a sense the last spot in Farrell’s 33-man World Cup selection would boil down to McCloskey and Connacht back row Cian Prendergast.
In the end, McCloskey made the cut and now that his place on the plane is secured, he can aim to make a valuable contribution in France.
As an out-and-out 12, he doesn’t offer the same flexibility as centres like Henshaw and Aki, who can play both 12 and 13. If he’s not in the starting team it will be a challenge to make the bench, as Farrell might feel versatile options such as Jimmy O’Brien or Jack Crowley cover more bases in the event the backline is forced into a reshuffle.
However with centre proving such an attritional position for Ireland over the years there will be minutes there for McCloskey and as ever, it’s highly likely that injuries will dictate much of Farrell’s planning.
At 6’4″ and 111kg, McCloskey is a powerful ball-carrier with good handling skills. He has the ability to cause real damage in the opening games against Romania and Tonga while his physicality could suit the bigger challenges that await further down the line.
Whatever the way the cards fall in France, McCloskey has earned his chance to play on the game’s biggest stage.
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