For players and backroom staff, the aftermath of a World Cup exit can be long and often boozy — a slow and emotional wind-down. Unless it’s in France. In keeping with the bureaucratic nature of this tournament, everyone had to be packed up and out of their hotel rooms by 11am last Monday, even though the flight out of Charles de Gaulle wasn’t until 6.30pm.
There was, admittedly, a practical reason for Ireland’s swift removal from their golf and spa retreat an hour north of Paris. The Springboks were moving in that afternoon to prepare for their semi-final, so at least Ireland were spared the irony of being replaced, literally, by a side they had beaten three weeks earlier.
What next? The IRFU will conduct a review, but only because this is standard procedure. No outside agency will be hired to lift the lid on this World Cup failure. There will be no investigation into the choice of game plan; no discussion of “performance anxiety”.
A common refrain within the group is that they are not defined by last weekend’s defeat, but what they achieved in the preceding 15 months. All that prevented them from making further history was one heroic tackle from Jordie Barrett.
That still seems a bit too easy. It’s in our nature to seek scapegoats and to concoct conspiracy theories. So we’ve decided on a game of True or False. Anything to fill the void.
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Ireland were fatigued because there wasn’t enough rotation
Answer: False
The Springboks had barely unpacked last Monday before Rassie Erasmus was airing a theory that sounded suspiciously like a dig at Andy Farrell. “Some teams just picked their best team in every game,” South Africa’s director of rugby said. “I think it’s tough to do that.”
But can you ascribe fatigue to a team that puts together a 37-phase of attack — only ended by a questionable penalty award to the All Blacks — lasting five minutes and 19 seconds at the end of a game that had the highest ball-in-play time, by two minutes, of any in the tournament?
Farrell’s selection strategy was sound. Unlike Erasmus, he didn’t have the advantage of playing Rugby Championship in miniature during July and August. He needed to get his first-choice team ready for a mini-final against the Springboks in round three and that involved re-integrating Johnny Sexton, who had missed the warm-up games. Farrell stacked his side repeatedly in the knowledge that he had a built-in rest week before Scotland.
For sure, some clocked up a lot of minutes. Hugo Keenan and Bundee Aki didn’t miss a second, and Tadhg Beirne and Peter O’Mahony weren’t far behind. Two more weeks might have been a stretch. We’ll never know. We just know that they were OK last Saturday.
Ireland lost because they choked
Answer: False.
This is a popular theory among Ireland’s anti-rugby faction, whose chippiness apparently precludes cogent analysis. To choke implies a mental weakness and yet if this Ireland team was mentally weak, it would not have been able to recover so impressively from such a poor start, and to counter-punch repeatedly.
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It’s generally easier to play the role of front runner. It’s what this side was used to. During their 17-game winning streak, only once — against Samoa, pre-tournament — did they trail at the break. Were nerves to blame for that sloppy first quarter last week, by the end of which Ireland trailed 0-13?
But how do you measure nerves? If you measure it by the number of errors in the first 60 seconds, then New Zealand have never been so jittery. There is no anecdotal evidence to suggest that the mood in Ireland’s camp was any different from other matches in the tournament.
Clearly, Ireland weren’t at their sharpest in that first quarter — ball-carriers isolated, lineout not secure, and so on. But the All Blacks had a large part in this. You’d have expected them to be operating at peak aggression levels, seeing as this was their first game of substance since the tournament opener five weeks previously.
Ireland, by contrast, were playing their third big game in a row. The nature of top-level tournament sport is that you have dips and peaks in performance. Think of New Zealand in 2019 — peak against Ireland in the quarter-final, dip the following week and get smashed by a rampant England, who in turn dipped for the final. Ireland had their lull in the first quarter last week and they recovered. They just didn’t recover well enough.
New Zealand won the tactical analysis battle
Answer: True
Given that Ireland were strong favourites to top pool B once they beat the Springboks, the New Zealand coaching staff effectively had three weeks to scout them. Joe Schmidt probably had been scouting Farrell’s side for the past year.
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All three of New Zealand’s tries showed the value of long hours spent in the video analysis suite. In the planning that went into Ardie Savea’s try, the players had been shown how reliant Ireland were on Jamison Gibson-Park to cover the short side off lineout attacks in their 22, and therefore how vulnerable he was.
They were also shown vulnerabilities in Ireland’s defence at the tail of four-man lineouts, though of course it still required speed, precision and exquisite skill from Aaron Smith and Richie Mo’unga to set up Will Jordan.
You can imagine Schmidt spotting the empty chip-space for the first try, too. You can imagine him telling Beauden Barrett to shape initially as if to launch a bomb; to fool the cover, also encouraging him to roll the ball back between his legs post-tackle to ensure the quickest recycle possible. As ever with Schmidt, the devil was in the detail.
Ireland’s scrum got no breaks from Wayne Barnes
Answer: True
Tyrel Lomax and Ethan de Groot are stronger props than the ones Ireland faced in New Zealand last year yet Ireland still backed their scrum to dominate. It says something of New Zealand’s general performance that they denied Ireland a single scrum feed. The All Blacks had five scrums in total — three of which yielded penalties. This had a huge bearing on the outcome.
Listen to neutral scrum specialists and it’s hard to find unanimity on those penalty calls. The former England prop Alex Corbisiero reckons the first should have been awarded to Ireland. The ex-Springbok BJ Botha reckons Barnes got all his calls right.
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Mike Ross might not be considered impartial, yet he makes a compelling point about the third penalty, in the 66th minute, two minutes after Ireland’s penalty try (24-25) with Codie Taylor in the bin. Ross points out that the All Blacks left the tight-head side without a flanker, which is a non-negotiable when you are a man down, as it left replacement Fletcher Newell exposed to Andrew Porter.
Well, it’s a non-negotiable unless you are happy for the scrum to wheel, because you’re confident the ref will blame Porter. Which he did, explaining: “No one went forward. You just ran left.” But why would Ireland want to wheel a scrum when they have a one-man advantage? A strange call, and a big momentum shifter.
Ireland won’t get a better chance to reach the last four at the Rugby World Cup
Answer: False
This felt like a special opportunity and yet, at the risk of re-stating the obvious, this was also Ireland’s toughest-ever draw, and the least fair. World Rugby have promised that the draw for 2027 will be made much closer to the tournament, and that it will be based on contemporaneous rankings. There is no reason to believe that Ireland will have plummeted in those rankings by then.
Farrell’s contract only runs until 2025, when he is hot favourite to lead the Lions to Australia. But the IRFU is confident that Farrell will return from that sabbatical to complete the World Cup cycle. His family is settled and happy here and he is apparently excited about the talent coming through.
Johnny Sexton’s retirement leaves a leadership void and leaves Farrell with a decision — to choose a short-term captaincy option like O’Mahony or to pick a leader with 2027 in mind. Caelan Doris would get my vote. An eloquent speaker, his position lends itself to the captaincy and he is probably Ireland’s best player. New Zealand seemed to think so, judging by the way they went after him last week.
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For those still numbed by the disappointment of defeat, we can only point you in the direction of the letter-writer to the Irish Times last Wednesday, who summed it up neatly:
Sir, South Africa beat France, who beat New Zealand, who beat Ireland, who beat South Africa. It really was all that close.