Two rounds down, and already a significant theme of this Six Nations is just how serenely Ireland have moved on from the disappointment of their World Cup quarter-final defeat by New Zealand. As Andy Farrell would put it: Hangover? What hangover?
We got a different take on it from Paul O’Connell, though. Ireland’s assistant coach was speaking in an interview in December, when the wound was still relatively raw, but he left you in no doubt that the pain of that defeat in the Stade de France would never fully dissipate.
“I don’t think you get over losses like that,” O’Connell told the Irish Examiner. “They’re part of you and so a part of you has died. I’ll be talking about that game years from now. There’s a scar there and you know it’ll be there for ever and that’s just the way it is.”
No one was heaping blame on the 44-year-old and yet no one could escape the damning evidence: Ireland’s lineout, O’Connell’s main area of coaching responsibility, was the worst-performing sector of their game, with an efficiency of 82.5 per cent (according to Opta), leaving it 13th in the tournament, behind Samoa, Italy and Portugal.
Those numbers left little room for the reality that against South Africa and New Zealand especially, Ireland had been up against the two best lineout defences in the sport. That level of difficulty was acknowledged by IRFU’s high performance director, David Nucifora — a former hooker, incidentally, who still pointed out that “we weren’t as consistent as we’d have liked to be” before stating, rather pointedly: “We’ve got to find a way to improve our lineout attack to be able to get ahead of the game.”
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The Six Nations stats suggest that O’Connell has managed to do just that. Ireland’s lineout efficiency stands at a gleaming 100 per cent, 26 out of 26. An even more impressive fact is that in Marseille, where Ireland scored their biggest-ever win in France, all five of Ireland’s tries were sourced directly or indirectly from the lineout.
Modestly, O’Connell has pointed out that Ireland were mostly operating against a seven-man pack that night and that France’s miscreant, Paul Willemse, is also one of their most powerful lifters. He also noted that Italy rarely challenged Dan Sheehan’s throw two weeks ago.
“We haven’t changed a massive amount,” O’Connell told the media last week. “I’d say we’re doing what we do a little bit better, across the board. How we lift, how we jump, how we call, how we throw; all those things contribute. We learnt a lot from those World Cup games against South Africa and New Zealand. One of the things was being able to manage a little bit of trouble and trying to get out of it. And the other thing we learnt from the World Cup is it’s like every part of your game, it’s never just one thing.”
O’Connell the coach sounds more philosophical than O’Connell the player. Now a father of three, he looks less physically imposing — entirely bald, less bulky. There’s still that intensity in the eyes, however. Remember that this is the man who once brought his wife to tears because of an argument over a game of Monopoly.
His insanely competitive nature always seemed an obstacle to a career in coaching, which requires an ability to compartmentalise that rarely showed as a player. Martin Johnson rated him in his top three locks of all time. But how often do star players make star coaches too?
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Sure enough, O’Connell’s coaching career was slow to catch fire. After injury forced him to retire in 2016, there was some part-time consultancy work with the Munster academy, then one season as assistant coach with a middling Ireland Under-20s squad that included Caelan Doris and Dan Sheehan.
His time in the Top 14 was short-lived, lasting just one season with Stade Français, who finished eighth in the league. O’Connell later said that the club had been “disorganised” though the French media put his early departure down to a personality clash with the head coach, Heyneke Meyer. He soon went down the punditry route with BBC TV, where he immediately made a positive impression — articulate, opinionated and always rigorously prepped.
You sensed there was still a coach in there, though. He had often enjoyed strong relationships with his own coaches, with men like Gert Smal, another lineout geek who helped Ireland win a grand slam in 2009 and who taught O’Connell enough Afrikaans to help him unpick the Springboks’ lineout.
As Ireland captain, he was a devoted disciple of Joe Schmidt. “I would say my coach education process was being coached by Joe for two years and studying and reflecting on it,” O’Connell has said. “Joe is a coach who got you ready for that moment where you’re under pressure, fatigued, with 50,000 people watching, because he coached you until you couldn’t get it wrong.”
Given that shortage of coaching experience, however, Farrell was still rolling the dice when he co-opted O’Connell before the start of the 2021 Six Nations. Ireland lost their first two games that year, to Wales and France but his influence was soon beginning to be felt, especially in a comprehensive 32-18 defeat of England in the final game.
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“Paulie coming in was the final piece of the jigsaw,” Johnny Sexton said last year. “He married Joe’s strengths with Andy’s. He saw that we’d lost some of the things that Joe had given us, like our detail at the ruck, our discipline, our habits in training. And of course Andy let Paulie be himself. That’s what he does so well, as well as putting on the table what’s expected and what’s not accepted.”
The bad cop to Farrell’s good cop? No, that’s too simplistic. To describe the relationship as master and apprentice doesn’t quite capture it either — although O’Connell is still probably the favourite to replace Farrell as head coach, assuming that Farrell stands aside at the end of the World Cup cycle. There must also be a strong chance that Farrell will make O’Connell part of his coaching team for next year’s British and Irish Lions tour to Australia.
What unites them is the warrior instinct that they shared as players plus an appreciation that coaching requires more rounded skills. You sense that O’Connell is embarrassed by the old clip from the Ireland dressing room in 2007, when he exhorted his players to “put the fear of God” into their English opponents; certainly, the present regime would not allow such footage to see the light of day.
But the Ireland dressing room is entirely different these days, anyway. “We don’t rely on emotion,” O’Connell says. “Relying on emotion can be exhausting, certainly week on week. I think Andy manages the whole energy of the group really well.
“For most of my playing days I would have clung on to a lot of old-school beliefs, like, ‘This game needs to be more important to us than it is to them.’ Make it into life or death. That was our mindset. But Andy says you don’t want to be desperate. You want to be accurate on the big occasion.”
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Wales have been warned.
Ireland v Wales
Aviva Stadium, Saturday, 2.15pm
TV: ITV1
