Time to take our rightful place among rugby’s great nations
And by ‘everything’ we don’t mean the past month, or the past year or past four years either.
Rather, we mean a whole decade culminates in Wellington on Saturday. Win and this Irish team will rightly go where no Irish team has gone before. Lose, and for all this side’s many achievements, they’ll have lasted no longer than the Irish sides whose trophy cabinets contained only wooden spoons.
It’s worth recounting — and counting — just how far Irish rugby has come from there to here, if only because many of us forget that a whole generation of Irish rugby supporters has little idea just how bleak and dark the old days were.
From 1986 to 1999, there were only two years when we managed to win more than one Championship game in a season. In that time we played 56 Five Nations games and won only 11. We beat Scotland just once; England, only three times. We could never beat France. Our only real prospect of a win was against Wales, and even then it was a strange arrangement we had with them: we could always beat them in Cardiff or Wembley but seemingly never on our own patch at Lansdowne.
And yet as hopeless as we were back then, it still came as something of a shock when in 1999 we somehow didn’t make it through to a fourth consecutive World Cup quarter-final. That defeat in Lens was as rare and as freakish as a win in the old Five Nations Championship.
Everything changed, of course, in 2000 when a fresh-faced Brian O’Driscoll was joined by Ronan O’Gara in the lineup for the home game against Scotland. A month later they were even beating the French in Paris.
It would be wrong to say that Irish rugby has never looked back since — there have been many setbacks, and just the one Grand Slam — but it would be fair to say it has never been the same.
Since the turn of the millennium, or at least since the humiliating defeat to England in Twickenham only weeks after it, Ireland have been extraordinarily consistent.
Since the start of 2000 we’ve won 42 of our 60 championship games. In that time France have won only three more games, albeit five more championships.
The Welsh, though they’ve won twice as many Slams as us, have only had a winning percentage of just 48%, compared to our 70%.
Not only have we beaten all the teams that are on the same side of the draw as us, but we’ve beaten them far more often than they’ve beaten us, with the exception of the French who now seem hellbent on beating themselves.
Since Martin Johnson lifted the Webb Ellis trophy into the Sydney sky, we’ve maintained a 70% championship winning record; England’s has dropped to 56%. We’ve beaten them in seven of our last eight championship head-to-head clashes. We’ve beaten Wales in eight of our last 11 clashes with them.
The point is this: all that counts. All that adds up and invariably culminates in groundbreaking success.
Privately, a lot of the Dublin footballers in the lead-up to last month’s All-Ireland final were bemused by the media’s obsession with Kerry’s championship record with Dublin since 1978 and especially the encounter in 2009. None of their defence played in that game. Since that tie they had beaten Kerry in their two head-to-head league clashes. They’d won 83% of their away league games, when in the five previous seasons they had only a 35% away win rate, a fragility and inconsistency that revealed itself in August, just like the more robust confidence and consistency translated into September success this year.
It is inconceivable that this Irish team, after all that heavy lifting, would never have a World Cup semi-final to show for it, just as it’s impossible now to think they would never have had a Grand Slam or championship to show for it either.
Of course, it would be typical Wales to just breeze onto the dancefloor and whisk away the girl that this Irish team have spent a decade chatting up.
But there’s a sense of destiny about this Irish team, as if O’Gara was brought back into the starting 15 to finish what he began all those years ago against Scotland, when he and Pete Stringer stood shoulder to shoulder with Mick Galwey.
Since the inception of the World Cup, New Zealand and France have reached five semi-finals; Australia and England, four apiece. South Africa have made it that far three times, while Wales (1987), Scotland (1991) and Argentina (2007) have also experienced what it’s like to play in a World Cup semi-final.
We’re the odd ones out.
This might not be rugby country but it is a great rugby country, thanks to this generation of player. It is time to take our place among the great rugby nations. You sense this Ireland team will seize it — and more.
* Contact: kieranshannon@eircom.net
