If Eddie won’t change his personal tactics, the bell will toll once more

I WOULD like to apologise to readers for my seriously inaccurate column that appeared on this page on the first Friday of September.

In it, I praised the Irish rugby team, comparing its attitude to that of Roy Keane — a winner — and predicted that it would make a serious challenge for the 2007 World Cup.

Clearly, I was very wrong, as befits someone who never played at a higher level than the Sundays Well seconds, and that was 20 years ago. That’ll teach me to stick my neck out. But I know lots of people who have played at the very highest level and who are analysts now with detailed knowledge of the game.

I had been duped by their confidence — notwithstanding their acknowledgment that beating either France or Argentina would be extremely difficult — but even more so by the positive attitude of the coach and players, many of whom I had interviewed in recent months.

For example, I had spoken at length on radio to coach Eddie O’Sullivan only the Wednesday before the competition started. I finished with a straightforward question: can Ireland win this World Cup? The response was immediate: “Yeah”.

The other consolation is that I was not alone in expecting far more from the Irish team than it delivered. Much more importantly, O’Sullivan’s employers, the IRFU, believed in him specifically and by extension in the team he had assembled. It had backed him with unprecedented financial resources over the past four years and had given him extraordinary power to do as he wished in preparing the side.

It proved that by providing him with an extraordinary vote of confidence prior to the World Cup when the IRFU agreed a four-year extension to his contract even before it had a chance to assess performance on the biggest stage of all.

While O’Sullivan has said he will review what went wrong, he can do so with the comfort that others are more likely to suffer the consequence of losing their jobs in his backroom team or on the playing squad itself. He is untouchable.

Philip Browne, the IRFU’s chief executive, moved with extraordinary speed to defend O’Sullivan and to reassure everyone that the coach’s job was not under threat. It seems there is no need for even a review as far as the IRFU is concerned.

Now, I don’t want to be one of those armchair critics who immediately seeks the dismissal of people from their jobs as a result of perceived failures. There is an old Chinese proverb about how one man should not want to break another man’s soup bowl, although no doubt O’Sullivan’s financial compensation, should he lose his job now, would be substantial given the contract extension he has signed.

O’Sullivan’s ambitions for an elevated place in Irish sporting history and his hopes of becoming British and Irish Lions coach in 2009 have been dashed.

Still, he has been ruthless in getting his own way when it suited him. He had no compunction about swiftly settling himself into his predecessor’s job when Warren Gatland was fired as Ireland’s coach. Nobody blamed him for taking the opportunity when it was presented to him, but the speed with which he stepped up from assistant was notable.

He has shown no sentiment in his handling of players, as many of those who sat out the entire rugby World Cup will testify. His man-management skills appear deficient, especially following the IRFU’s decision to replace former manager Brian O’Brien with an IRFU bureaucrat rather than a seasoned former player who could act as a buffer or sounding board for players who didn’t want to deal directly with the coach.

He appears to have kept the players away from friends and family for too long, which may help explain why married father-of-three David Humphries made himself unavailable for the World Cup, and the chosen base in France was regarded as a soulless place not suited to the players.

The preparation compared badly with that of the Argentine squad who came together only a fortnight before the competition, but who played for each other and their country passionately and who bonded intimately with their fans in France whenever possible.

An apparent lack of morale within the Irish squad suggests that when confidence slumped because of a lack of form, there was no other well from which to draw.

There are also serious questions about the physical conditioning of the squad and the lack of game time before the competition began. Many doubt the value of a Polish training camp that O’Sullivan forces the players to endure, where use of a special freezing chamber allows them to train for far longer than is considered good in normal circumstances. The players may have overtrained, or did not have enough competitive game time, but either way they were not right for the World Cup.

O’Sullivan had been touted before the tournament as the best coach Ireland has ever had, but nothing in the tournament provided any evidence to support that. The team’s tactile approach was sterile at best and unyielding when it required change. Indeed, the players looked unable to think for themselves, afraid to go against the instructions of a man with complete control over their careers. If you don’t do it Eddie’s way, you won’t get to do it at all, it seems, and there’s no room for argument with a man who has a new four-year contract in his back pocket. And there is the issue of selection. O’Sullivan had failed to prepare alternatives in key positions, so even when the likes of Ronan O’Gara (and the team) might have benefited from him being withdrawn, the coach did not have suitable replacements he trusted. Had he even used his subs’ bench in matches over the past few years, this problem might not have arisen.

CLEARLY there are a lot of things for which O’Sullivan is getting the blame. He is going to find his career a lot tougher than it has been as he remains in his job.

The first indication he received of just how much things have changed came within minutes of Sunday’s routing by Argentina. TV3’s touchline reporter Sinéad Kissane asked him whether he would reconsider his position following the result. O’Sullivan affected not to hear her and asked her to repeat the question.

A less experienced, or less committed, reporter might have buckled and rephrased it but, correctly, she stood her ground and asked it again. Her reward was the admiration of the viewing public, combined with a dagger-like stare from O’Sullivan and an outrageously sexist attack on her professionalism by sacked Scottish rugby coach Matt Williams in the Setanta TV studio. There remains considerable affection for the players among the rugby public, based on their past performances for Ireland and for their provinces when they showed they are better than they played in the World Cup. O’Sullivan would do well to remember that they remain much more popular than he does.

While he has had some success, its currency — Triple Crowns in failed Six Nations’ campaigns — is now valued differently. O’Sullivan is parodied on Gift Grub for management-speak, such as “you can’t unring a bell”. If he is to prove himself worthy of keeping his job, it looks like he is going to have to change and improve himself, partly by ceding his total control, uncomfortable as that might be to him. If he doesn’t, that famous bell will toll for him before four years are up.

Matt Cooper presents The Last Word on 100-102 Today FM, Monday to Friday, 4.30pm to 7pm and TV3’s rugby World Cup quarter-finals live coverage this weekend.