There’s absolutely no upside to Irish defeat to England

Make a case, urged the email from the sports editor, that it’s a good thing, in the long run, to lose the Six Nations opener at home to England this weekend.

Can’t make that case, I responded. It will be a very short column.

Ah, he replied, but see how Exeter came to Thomond Park and almost did a number on Munster. Won’t that serve Johann van Graan well?

The man almost has a point.

Exeter took points off Munster in their opening Heineken Cup pool game at Sandy Park last October. It was the only fixture of 10 between Irish and English clubs in European fare this season that hasn’t finished with an Irish success.

It can be beneficial to take the learnings from a loss to a superior team, but there’s no case to be made in that regard between Ireland and England. At least I don’t see one. Cast your mind back a year to Twickenham, analyse the footage from that game and the one before that in Dublin.

On almost all fronts, Ireland are superior technically, tactically and individually to England. Can England really claim to be addressing the issues when you have George Ford coming out saying that club form bears no relevance to international form? That’s not good. What is form? It is building consistency, creating good habits in the search to get better.

Joe Schmidt is not obsessed with results, he is obsessed with performance. However, for the rest of us, you have to benchmark these things, and the most robust metric is results.

If you look at the graph from an England point of view — and remember none of them are playing outside the Premiership — then let’s not fool ourselves here. Okay, so this is what we have done against the Irish boys in the last year, but all of a sudden, we expect to put on a white jersey with a rose and to beat them?

I don’t get the logic. There’s no scenario, there’s no case to construct where it’s good for Ireland to lose tomorrow in the context of the World Cup. That is then, this is now. Japan is a full seven months away.

Thankfully, Schmidt’s thing will be ‘next ball, next game’. Living in the moment and getting that right.

However, there is always the human variable. The necessity to front up and do your job really well. You expect Ireland to win, but it doesn’t come with a guarantee. That’s why we love sport. They have to get the emotional pitch right, the gameplan right, they have to deliver that plan and occasionally deviate from it and play what’s in front of them.

But there is still a far greater chance ofperforming on the daybecause their base level in key areas is far more consistent than England’s.

Munster’s tight squeeze at home to Exeter offers some context and relevance. Johann van Graan’s players went to Kingsholm in Round Five and were the aggressors, going out and winning with a ‘whatever-it-takes’ mentality aganst Gloucester.

Did a few of them say ‘we’re at home, Exeter, an English team at Thomond Park, the result looks after itself’? It could have got unbelievably awkward when Exeter were a point up and looking for the try. Eight points, as a winning margin, was their golden number.

A year ago, Munster would have lost that game. The difference now was Tadhg Beirne’s key moments and Joey Carbery’s three points from the penalty.

How good is Beirne? His capacity to win penalties at crucial moments is a massive pressure release for his colleagues.

He is a big miss for as long as he’s unavailable to Joe Schmidt and Ireland in the Six Nations. That knee ligament injury is a sore one and influences his poaching ability while also making him susceptible to getting felled at the knee around the ruck.

He has the tools to be a Steffon Armitage or a David Pocock, someone the opposition will meticulously prepare for and target – right down to putting a player in a bib with a big No 5 on him in training. Good teams will just look to take him out of the game by making him tackle - which dilutes his poaching role - or if he’s anywhere near a ruck, they will just tackle him to his feet. Quite sinister in fairness, but it’s allowed.

The good bit about Ireland is that they have accumulated a number of those talismanic players in recent years.

For that, for their capacity to step up from club to country quite seamlessly, a lot of credit must to the provincial system at home. At one point, it seemed Ireland had a galaxy of wonders in the back-row; that has now spread to the second-row, and it is for those times when you can’t call on Iain Henderson and Tadhg Beirne that you have an Ultan Dillane ready to explode if required.

I saw a headline lately about Schmidt’s ‘second-row crisis’, but there will never be a crisis at lock, in my view, if you can afford to leave Donnchadh Ryan sitting in Paris. If we are in the business now of declaring a crisis for the Ireland rugby team, let’s wait until we are without both Conor Murray and Johnny Sexton.

It’s hugely difficult to cast any thoughts forward towards Round Five of the Six Nations, but it is in Cardiff that I see the biggest obstacle to Ireland’s championship ambitions. Meteorologically, never mind psychologically, the last series of games is like another season at this early stage.

Tomorrow will be winter and cold in Dublin.

By Wales in the middle of March, things will be milder, weather-wise at least. However, Wales are smart Six Nations competitors, there will be a cracking atmosphere irrespective of whether Warren Gatland is chasing the championship or playing for pride.

In my experience, the Welsh are humming by Round Five. They will limit the tickets that fall into Irish hands. I don’t believe the Welsh players are better than the Irish players, but their capacity to raise their game for 80 minutes in Cardiff is massive. It’s a tall order to win there.

They are consistently average in Europe, but there is a totally different dynamic at play with the Welsh national team. The stimulus they live for is that red jersey.

If you are an owner of a Welsh club you might be disappointed with your internationals, but such has been, and will always be, the two-tiered culture in Welsh rugby.

Scotland, too, might just be discovering a concept that has been alien to their rugby for a long time – consistency.

Has the form of the two franchises and the national team ever been better at the same time? Gregor Townsend has made quantifiable progress playing a really nice brand of rugby.

Edinburgh have a big ‘Danger’ sticker on them as far as Munster is concerned in the Heineken Cup quarter-final.

Club and country is buying into a really strong, purposeful gameplan. It’s all very un-Scottish.