Postcards from the edge

Choosing the right location for a team base is fraught with difficulties. Declan Kidney’s choice for his charges has appeared to have been an inspired choice.

THE DEVIL, they say, is in the detail and if there’s one thing all coaches can agree on, putting your players in the right surroundings is half the battle won on the road to a successful tournament.

Choosing the right location for a team base is fraught with difficulties, as the England football manager Sven Goran Eriksson found out at the 2006 World Cup when he plumped for the spa town of Baden-Baden as the headquarters for his pampered players and their demanding WAGs. The place went into lock down as paparazzi besieged the town.

There’s not much chance of celebrity snappers disrupting any team’s preparations for Rugby World Cup 2011 here in New Zealand but teams still have plenty of options when it comes to finding the right base to suit their needs and get the best out of their players.

One man’s island is another’s prison and, mindful of the problems associated with Ireland’s last World Cup campaign in France in 2007 when Eddie O’Sullivan’s squad went a little stir crazy in their base in Bordeaux, Declan Kidney and his management team have opted to keep the squad moving during their Pool C campaign.

To a large extent teams are governed by the location of their games in New Zealand. Ireland will open in New Plymouth on Sunday against the United States and stay on the North Island for subsequent games in Auckland against Australia and Rotorua against Russia before heading to the South Island to face Italy in Dunedin.

Yet after a six-week stint in Carton House, outside Dublin, during which time Ireland played four warm-up test matches at home and away, Kidney has brought his 30-man squad to the almost impossibly picturesque lakeside town of Queenstown, on New Zealand’s South Island, to acclimatise for a week before getting down to the business of qualifying for the quarter-finals.

From the minute the players began their descent into Queenstown, which also serves as a ski resort for the nearby Coronet Peaks and Remarkables mountain range, Kidney’s choice has appeared to have been an inspired choice.

The Ireland coach has been planning for this tournament since he took the reins from O’Sullivan in late 2008 and first plumped for Queenstown before it was even offered as a host town to the 20 teams to have qualified for the tournament.Once it was, though, there was no hesitation in striking camp in the town and Georgia, who arrived in Queenstown this week, as well as England and Romania, who will stay here for mini camps midway through the pool phase, had similar ideas.

It’s not for every team, however, as the folks at the Discover Queenstown offices found out themselves when they pitched their corner of New Zealand to as many World Cup teams as would listen. While Ireland were looking for activities and a pleasant community to occupy their players between training sessions, the Discover Queentown staff found the strong points they offered were seen as unwanted distractions by others, including Argentina, who preferred the less enthralling Invercargill, around 200 kilometres further south, next stop the South Pole.

“When we were doing the reccies for Rugby World Cup we were told that there were a lot of places mad keen to get us,” Kidney said after the Ireland team arrived in Queenstown to a very warm welcome. “Ireland is a popular country on tour and that was probably shown at the airport.”

Ireland’s Australian defence coach Les Kiss had long known of Queenstown’s qualities as a training camp base for visiting teams and he had also done reconnaissance missions on the Pool C game venues, the Irish having purposely taken in New Plymouth and Taupo, close to Rotorua and the site for a three-night stay after the Australia game, on their 2009 tour. “A few years ago, when I flew back to Australia after the Grand Slam, I came home to visit the family. I popped across to New Zealand, went to New Plymouth and Taupo, just to give them a quick check,” Kiss recalled.

“Then Declan came over with Ger (Carmody, team operations manager) and they did another reccie and we planned our last tour there to connect those places. So there was a lot of planning went into it but we’re going to be in the North Island a fair bit except for Dunedin and this (Queenstown) is just an opportunity to get here a bit early and be in a place that could refresh their spirit and also get some facilities where they could still work on their rugby properly.

“They’ve been invigorated in that way and here it’s been able to give us what we want in all elements of their preparation — recovery from the flight, it’s nice to just walk up to a small village that the boys can really relate to.

“There’s a nice little Irish community here and it was a wonderful reception, so a lot of little things that touch you in the right place. I don’t know how you put that together, they’re little things that slowly put little bits of confidence around the place that they’re in and that we’ve picked.

“We’ve just got to make the most of it now and put the right performance on the park. Personally I think we’ll look back on this as a bit of a masterstroke.”