Kieran Shannon: Ireland will win a RWC quarter-final. But will we ever be as good as this team?
CHANCE WASTED: Ireland players Finlay Bealham, right, and Bundee Aki after their side's defeat. Photo by Harry Murphy/Sportsfile
When trying to capture just how gut-wrenching Ireland’s loss was last Saturday, people have equated it to an All Ireland their county left behind.
Think Limerick ’94 or ’96. Waterford 2017. For Cork now, 2013. Whatever near miss of Mayo’s they wish you didn’t have to choose.
But in a way this latest World Cup exit is even more devastating. Every GAA fan and almost every player has the solace that there is always next year. Rugby, at least its biggest prize, doesn’t work that way. It’s now another four years ’til last Saturday.
That’s the nature of World Cups but in rugby the wait is particularly pronounced, the stakes especially consequential. After Qatar Gareth Southgate and Didier Deschamps will only have had to wait less than two years for another football carnival and a shot at immortality: win Euro 2024 and Southgate and his team will forever be remembered for being the ones that brought football home.
In multiple sports the Olympics is the ultimate but even if it goes wrong there you can still do an Eamon Coghlan and be a made man for life for getting it right at a world championships either side of one.
Andy Farrell’s men don’t have that luxury. Many of his players may have the target and prize that is the Lions and of course there’ll always be the Six Nations and the chance of a Grand Slam. They’re still a bigger deal than your Nations League or your National League, but they ain’t the World Cup. That baby only comes around every four years.
That’s a long time to wait for the chance of the nation being as collectively enraptured as it was this past month but for the players that timeframe is especially cruel. The number 17 resonated on the double last Saturday night.
Not only is that the number of consecutive wins Ireland had recorded before the All Blacks ended that streak but that’s how many of Farrell’s World Cup squad that are aged 30 or over. More than Johnny Sexton or Keith Earls have played their last World Cup game for Ireland. In truth almost half the squad probably have.
The good news is that Australia 2027 will eventually come around and before we even know it; when you’re the age this column is, a World Cup (defeat) like 2011 only seems like about six years ago; 2015 and Argentina four years ago; Japan two years ago.
But as soon as it will be here, and as world-class as the Irish conveyer belt of talent is, how long will we have to wait before we produce another out-half like Sexton? Will we ever again?
It was brought home catching a snippet of the Late Late last Friday when Ian Madigan briefly sat opposite to Patrick Kielty. Fine player but hardly a household name, at least in ours where the young fella had to ask who he was.
Two generations have only known bona fide lifeforces wearing number 10 for Ireland. Irish rugby may have been cursed to keep falling short of breaking that World Cup quarter-final barrier but it has blessed to have had essentially quarter of a century of either O’Gara or Sexton.
It’s surely too much to ask for or get yet another out-half who’ll be such a sheer force of personality; no system, even one as good as Ireland’s, can be a third time lucky. Right now we’d settle for a Jack Crowley developing into another David Humphreys.
The Law of Averages was at work in another way over the weekend. Unless you have a team well ahead of the rest, a la New Zealand in 2015, chances are if you play enough other top teams, one of them will beat you before the tournament’s end. Even the Limerick hurlers, who have won either a Munster title or an All Ireland the last six years, have only once gone an entire Munster round-robin campaign unbeaten.
In Japan 2019 no team went the tournament undefeated: South Africa, you might remember, were beaten in their opening game by the All Blacks. With respect to England, no team in 2023 will go unbeaten either.
There was always the fear and chance that when you have four teams of the quality of France, South Africa, Ireland and New Zealand all on the one side of the draw, invariably they were going to take games off one another.
That is how it has transpired: right now they all have a record of 1-1 against each other. The only thing is, by virtue of getting their defeat out of the way early on, the Springboks and the All Blacks will get the chance to make their record against their fellow heavyweights 2-1 – and lift the Webb Ellis for a fourth time.
What is so tormenting about last Saturday though is more than yet another World Cup quarter-final was lost and the team’s supporters will have to endure at least four more years of jibes inside and outside the country.
The anguish is that a real chance to win the whole thing is gone.
Someday Ireland will win a World Cup quarter-final and go further than the men of 2023. But will we ever be again as close or as good as they were? We’ll hear Zombie again after a game this team play but will they and the rest of us ever get their Dreams?
We’ll have to wait and see. At least four years til last Saturday.
