Tommy Martin: He is definitely Not Joe, but who is Andy Farrell? 

Who knows how it will end up for Andy Farrell and Ireland?

When this is all over, how will it be between us and the great grizzly bear who sits benignly in the coaching box overseeing the latest franchise in the Irish rugby team’s cinematic universe?

Will he be up there in the pantheon with the likes Big Jack and Micko and Willie Mullins and Brian Cody, untouchables, chiselled in marble for eternity? Or will he end up like all Irish rugby coaches, mangled in the barbed wire of another World Cup failure?

SIX NATIONS RUGBY CHAMPIONSHIP 2023

Your home for the latest news, views and analysis of this year's Six Nations Championship from our award winning sports team.

SIX NATIONS RUGBY CHAMPIONSHIP 2023

Your home for the latest news, views and analysis of this year's Six Nations Championship from our award winning sports team.

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Rugby’s quadrennial jamboree is to Irish rugby coaches what the vast plains of Russia were to avaricious historical dictators. Never mind General Winter, General Webb Ellis is Irish rugby’s deadliest foe. All in the modern era have ridden off on their chariots, waving to the adoring populace; all have returned in various states of bedragglement.

But more of that anon. It is the eve of the Six Nations and the campfires are lit and around them sit the Irish warriors, sharpening their blades, for in the morning they fight! More accurately, they are nursing coffees in their training camp in Portugal between rehearsing lineouts and backline cha-cha-cha. In a cool, warlike kind of way, of course.

Overseeing it all is Farrell, whose geese are all swan right now. You don’t beat the All Blacks down under and then South Africa and Australia and have the World Rugby algorithms spit you out on top of the pile without doing something right.

And something right he is clearly doing. When dear old Peter O’Mahony cracked a smile and told us in November 2021 that he’d just spent the most enjoyable month of his career with his Ireland chums, you thought, oh Pete, I’m so happy for you. That wary, pound dog look on his face all these years, all he wanted was a game of scrabble in the evenings after training.

That, as much as the funkier style of play that was beginning to reveal itself, told us conclusively that whatever Andy Farrell was, he was Not Joe. Handbrake turns in coaching style are par for the course in sport but being Not Joe seemed of particular urgency after the trainwreck end to the Schmidt years.

The impression you would get about Farrell’s predecessor from tales smuggled out of camp was that he was like the psycho jazz drumming teacher from the movie Whiplash, drilling his charges until their thumbs bled. The fabled story of the prop who dropped his hotel key card and was lambasted for his carelessness may just be that, a fable, but its existence tells a tale.

Merely being Not Joe wouldn’t have sustained Farrell for long; nor is the Ireland rugby set up just Jesse Lingard-riding-on-an-inflatable-unicorn good vibes. The people around it keep talking about the ‘environment’ that has been created. On the face of it, that is just another one of those vague corporate nouns that rugby loves to sprinkle about but it tells of a carefully constructed ethos that at least tries to treat rugby players as more than just fast-moving lumps of meat.

This explains some of the uneasiness about allowing the Netflix cameras into the sacral halls of the team hotel, as much as fears that someone would leave a copy of Paulie O’Connell’s Big Book O’Lineout Calls lying about. Maybe there’s a downside to people in Boise, Idaho getting to know the real Finlay Bealham.

So, if he has long ceased to be Not Joe, who is Andy Farrell? He occupies one of the top sporting offices in the land and yet it is hard to put a defining finger on him. He is neither outspoken nor dull. As typical coaching stances go, he is neither beakily cerebral nor gruffly belligerent. He has alpha male presence but is socially generous, often adding “isn’t it?” at the end of his answers as if to include the interlocutor so that the point being made feels like a collaboration.

There is a softness about him but it is the softness of a hard man who has no need to show it. If you were of a mind to take a liberty you could look up his highlights reel for the rugby league Hall of Fame. It shows him larruping his way to greatness in the 13-man game, from hometown teenage hero with Wigan to captain of Great Britain and twice voted rugby league’s Man of Steel. Only in rugby league could such a thundering heteronormative sound endearing.

Farrell’s graduation from the hardest of sport’s hard schools is an all access pass when it comes to questions of character and spine. He is the archetypal north of England bloke. His hometown was chosen by George Orwell for his study of the pre-war English working class, The Road to Wigan Pier. Wigan, too, is home to England’s oldest Irish club, a fact illustrated in Farrell’s name and in those of the parish rugby league teams in which he first blazed a trail.

But if he is informed and shaped by his class and background he is not bound by them. He walked tall among the genteel classes of the Tory shires after his conversion to rugby union. If he has his doubts about the blazered alickadoos of the IRFU or the C-suite bluffers he must meet at sponsors' functions, he doesn’t let it show.

The other thing we know about Andy Farrell is that he became a father at 16, to England’s captain Owen. Imagine that. It is writ large on him, that sense that whatever the worst thing that can happen, we’ll get through it, it’ll work out. That’s not a bad quality to have in sport.

Maybe that’s how we should see him then, Andy Farrell: a great big, beardy rugby dad, reassuring in his presence, looking out for his pups, showing the tough love when needed. At least until General Webb Ellis gets him, in which case we can blame the parents.