Peter Jackson: Was this New Zealand result one of Ireland's best ever?
Ireland’s Garry Ringrose is tackled by Will Jordan and Akira Ioane of New Zealand.
During one of his many lightbulb moments, Thomas Edison came across an English proverb proclaiming that everything comes to him who waits. It made him stop and think.
After due consideration, the American inventor decided that a pragmatic twist would give the words more meaning so he rearranged them to read: “Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.”
It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that sometime pre-2016, some bright rugby spark saw what Edison was driving at and wondered if it offered a clue as to why Ireland had played New Zealand for more than 100 years and never beaten them: far, far too much waiting, far too little hustling.
Brighter sparks were already on the case, chipping away at the inferiority complex, motivated by an impatience to turn the tide of history rather than go on waiting for something to turn up, like a happy accident. What Ireland first achieved under Joe Schmidt at Soldier Field five years ago has now been superseded by his successor as head coach.
Andy Farrell is not old enough to pass judgement but many of us whose memories stretch back to the late ’50s cannot remember an Irish performance to match this one. To take Edison at his word and say they hustled the world’s No.1 team off their global perch is to damn with faint praise.
Ireland didn’t hustle the All Blacks; they hounded them for most of the first half and hounded them for most of the second. Far from hanging on during the final five minutes, their remorseless hounding effectively stopped the hitherto unstoppable inside the distance.
Joey Carbery performed the last rites, his final penalty putting New Zealand out for the count with 32 seconds left. No amount of red-clock time thereafter would have made a blind bit of difference.
Knee-jerk reactions, more often than not, do those who have gone before an injustice but this must surely rank as the best of all one-off victories. Better than the 43-13 hammering of a poor England team at Croke Park in 2007; better than the nerve-wracking Grand Slam clincher in Cardiff two years later, more complete than the first home win over New Zealand.
At the start, in the middle, and at the end, Ireland’s level of controlled fury backed by high-octane technical proficiency and Garry Ringrose’s creative craft in the mayhem of midfield ultimately left the All Blacks with nowhere to go.
They simply couldn’t live with it and when could that be said of a New Zealand team losing a test match on this side of the equator? A winning margin of 12 or 15 would not have exaggerated home superiority.
It would have been justified for a variety of reasons, most of all for their vaulting ambition. When did Ireland show the courage of their convictions to spurn the safe option of a shot at goal to go for the corner; not once, not twice but three times in the first half alone?
When were the All Blacks so defused as an attacking force in Europe that only one department of their overall game merited praise, the disciplined nature of their besieged defence?
When did they suffer a beating comprehensive enough to provoke pundits all over New Zealand into ringing alarm bells at the over-powering nature of Ireland’s triumph?
And when did a country whose current team had averaged six tries over 16 tests in the last four months find itself out-tried as well as out-pointed?
Answer: when they last rocked up to the Aviva three years ago and Jacob Stockdale got the solitary touchdown.
Scotland have been trying to beat New Zealand since 1905 without success, Wales since 1953.
France haven’t done so at home since 2000 and England last beat them at Twickenham nine years ago, all of which puts Ireland’s unprecedented hat-trick into historical perspective.
Johnny Sexton and Tadhg Furlong have now done it four times, floodlighting the country in a dazzle which Edison, for all his hustling and all his incandescent light bulbs, would have been hard pushed to match.
Best quip from the galaxy of television pundits: Ex-England prop David Flatman on the mountainous Tongan prop Ben Tameifuna said to weigh 23 stone: “Look, I’m 115kg but Ben could put me in his pocket and nobody would know I was there….”
Regrettably, rampant commercialism goes hand in hand with Test rugby. Instead of wearing their customary strip, Wales appeared on Sunday wearing black jerseys and a strange shade of green shorts. They could hardly justify it by claiming they had to avoid a colour clash with Fiji’s white but you wouldn’t put it past them …
