The rugby land of opportunity

EDDIE O’SULLIVAN may be looking forward to his reunion with the Ireland team this weekend, but you can be sure he won’t be spending too much time looking back on it once his first Test match in charge of the USA is over.

O’Sullivan’s latest incarnation, as the Eagles’ national team head coach, begins on Sunday at the Buck Shaw Stadium in Santa Clara, California, with the Setanta Challenge Cup Test against his former charges.

After O’Sullivan faces his old side in California he will take his new team to face Wales in Chicago on June 6 before returning west for the Churchill Cup tournament in Denver and games against Argentina A, England Saxons and a play-off match with either Ireland A, Canada, or Georgia.

The real meat and drink of O’Sullivan’s first summer in charge is what follows, though, as the USA meets North American rivals Canada for home and away 2011 Rugby World Cup qualifiers in Charleston, South Carolina, on July 4, and Edmonton on July 11.

Aside from well-documented and totally expected pleasantries and congratulations to the Grand Slam-winning players, O’Sullivan has been all business ahead of this Sunday’s game.

“We have a heavy schedule this summer, two Test games outside the international window but they’re very important to us, against Ireland and Wales,” he said. “Then we go straight into the Churchill Cup, which again is very valuable for us in terms of preparing for the World Cup qualifiers against Canada, which come straight after.

“It will be a big ask for us to win those games but it would be great if we could because it would put us directly into Rugby World Cup. So it’s really something to work towards.

“It’s very important for us to get these games against Ireland and Wales. They’ll be tough games and it will be exactly what we need to get our heads set for the World Cup qualifiers. So they’re of huge value to us in that respect and they will give us a good indicator of where we are in terms of our preparations.”

AT THE end of that programme, O’Sullivan is expecting to have a very clear picture of American prospects for the RWC qualifiers with Canada.

“The advantage of how these games fall, with five games in eight weeks, is that it’s a great run-in for us. Five games like that will have you match fit and up and running to play the World Cup qualifiers.”

O’Sullivan has been here before, as USA Rugby’s technical director for almost three years culminating at the 1999 World Cup before he returned to Ireland as assistant coach to Warren Gatland. The US rugby landscape is a very different one now to what it was when he left, for better and worse.

“If you look at the IRB standings, the USA has slipped back down the pecking order in recent years. In 1999 I think we were as high as 13 in the world and now we’re down at 19. That’s a symptom of the fact that a lot of countries like Georgia, Russia and Romania have managed to get a lot of their top players playing overseas.

“America has struggled to achieve the same level of integration into the professional game outside of the US and that has worked against America. But there is some genuine talent, raw talent, here. Looking at the college game here, it’s going very strongly, the Super League is a good base for the game to grow and grow and that’s been proven year on year.”

Participation and awareness in terms of media coverage is on the rise, though and as O’Sullivan reacquaints himself with life in Colorado and USA Rugby’s headquarters in Colorado Springs, the Irishman sees plenty of grounds for optimism.

“It’s a much bigger game here, it has grown,” O’Sullivan said. “It hasn’t broken the magic barrier of getting the game into the professional arena in America, which I think is a huge challenge and I’m not sure we’ll see that in the near future.

“But despite that the game isn’t professional here, it is growing and it’s going very, very well, particularly at the collegiate level, the high school and youth level which are the seeds for success down the road.”

The United States is by its nature a particularly difficult country in which to coach the national team of a low-profile sport, as O’Sullivan readily acknowledges.

“It’s a different dynamic than most head coaching jobs,” he says. “There are a number of issues around it and I suppose one would be the fact the domestic game here is still an amateur sport and so a sizeable number of your pool players would be from the domestic game.

“There are overseas players who play professionally but not enough to make up your whole team, so you’re still looking to make up the bulk of your Eagles pool from the domestic game which is amateur. And you have that compounded by the geography, the climate and the time zones.”

What has taken O’Sullivan by surprise ahead of the Ireland game, however, has been player availability. He expected to be without a large section of his professional roster, which includes Eagles flanker and captain Todd Clever, preparing to face the Lions with South African provincial side Xerox Lions, Overmach Parma’s Paul Emerick and Takudzwa Ngwenya of Biarritz.

He also will be without a number of injured players including Nese Malifa, Alec Parker, Rikus Pretorius and Matt Hawkins.

“I didn’t expect that sort of casualty (rate) for the first test,” O’Sullivan said last week. “So when you add it all up we’re suddenly with 15 guys unavailable. That is a bit of a concern, but I’m optimistic about this. It opens the door for other guys to come in.”

What the Eagles lack in exposure to the professional game, O’Sullivan believes is tempered by a quality that is typically American.

“One of the reasons I was happy to come back to work in America is that my admiration for rugby here is based on one word and it’s called energy.

“People go to extraordinary lengths to be involved in the game, play the game, coach the game and referee the game. It’s an extraordinary energy because it is a difficult game to be involved in because of the vastness of the country and diversity in terms of climate and time zones. But people go to a lot of trouble to be involved, there’s great passion for the game here and it’s very positive.”