It was an overheard conversation between two England fans last November, before the home Test against Australia, which underlined the shifting attitudes to Irish rugby.
“Why doesn’t Stuart Lancaster come back to England and take a real job in the Premiership?” asked one supporter. His companion balked at the notion. “Why would Lancaster want to leave Leinster – he is basically coaching the Ireland team?” he replied, pointing to his phone where Ireland’s win over New Zealand was unfolding.
He had a point. Irish rugby has had some vertiginous highs in the professional era but often failed to sustain them: now, it is in a position to be one of the pre-eminent forces in European rugby for years to come.
Is it an exaggeration to call Ireland the New Zealand of the north? Not especially. The countries have always had similarities – in population size and their attitudes towards bigger, bolshier rivals – but those shared attributes tended to stop when it came to the actual rugby.
No longer. Take coaching talent. English coaches are now seeing Irish rugby as the ideal environment to hone their skills – not just Lancaster, but his former assistant Andy Farrell, now leading the Irish national side, and Graham Rowntree at Munster. Similarly, English clubs are recognising Irish talent can make a difference to them – from Jerry Flannery, who was a forwards coach with Munster before playing a significant role as line-out and defence coach in Harlequins’ Premiership win last season, to Johann van Graan, who will take over at Bath after his stint with Munster. It would seem the current Irish model is creating better coaches, whether they are Irish or not.
The other telling observation in that conversation at Twickenham was the strength in depth of the playing pool in Ireland. The country may have a population just short of seven million, when Northern Ireland is included, but there is a steady stream of talent.
Irish Rugby’s centralised model helps – it is not dissimilar to New Zealand’s – as it encourages players to work towards a collective goal, and concentrates the best facilities and players into four provincial pools, all fed by schools whose facilities would be not far off those of a professional set-up.
No wonder Mike Catt has players looking so fluent – there are riches of talent. Hugo Keenan, who starts at full-back this weekend, is a wonderful example of a Leinster academy player who went to sevens and is on track to be of the stars of the 2023 World Cup.
There is still the argument that Irish rugby, particularly in Leinster, is still too dependent on private schools and even 15 years ago that is how Irish rugby’s fanbase was often confined, with the notable exception of Limerick. But that has not been true for some time: Munster’s Heineken Cup wins in 2006 and 2008 proved to the rest of Ireland the feel-good factor that could be generated from on-field success, while the 2009 Grand Slam and 2016 win over the All Blacks took the sport to a new level entirely.
Slowly but surely, rugby has become Ireland’s national obsession, a sport where national team press conferences make the evening news bulletins in the days building up to a big match, and big ticket retailers such as Aldi are happy to pump in sponsorship cash.
Not everything is perfect, of course. World Cup success remains maddeningly elusive and there are significant issues with the funding afforded to the women’s game. But even that offers a glimpse of the potential in the sport: the fallout from the women not qualifying for this year’s World Cup made the top stories on state broadcaster RTE, and became part of the national conversation. This level of cut-through would be almost impossible in England, where the sporting marketplace is so much more crowded, especially with the omnipresent Premier League.
None of this guarantees that Ireland will win at Twickenham, or that they will make the final stages of the 2023 World Cup. But whatever happens, Ireland will be talking about it – and working out how they can become even stronger.
