Door should not be closed and Kidney lost to Ireland
It is all very well for Irish rugby’s governing body to specify a world-class pedigree as its only criteria for the person who must take the national team into the 2015 World Cup, but, as Kidney will no doubt attest, there is much more to coaching Ireland than having a good curriculum vitae.
The potential list of available world-class candidates may be extensive, as the number of names in the betting markets suggest, but persuading the right one to throw his lot in with Ireland’s cause may not be as simple.
That should not reflect on Kidney’s tenure. Though he has been judged on his performance over the last 18 months, at the start of which period Ireland were dumped unceremoniously out of the 2011 World Cup quarter-finals by Wales and during which, last summer, they were thumped 60-0 by the All Blacks, a good Six Nations campaign this year would almost certainly have seen his contract renewed beyond this summer and onto 2015.
That it has not can be put down to an awful lot of misfortune with injuries, with a casualty list of such unprecedented levels that it put Kidney in a straitjacket from the very start of the championship.
Of course there have been mis-steps, not least the decision to jettison Ronan O’Gara, Ireland’s most-capped player, midway through the championship after first-choice fly-half Jonny Sexton had succumbed to the injury blight that had already claimed the participation of so many other senior figures, including Tommy Bowe, Stephen Ferris and Paul O’Connell.
Just writing that now, it is still mystifying why he chose a pivotal Six Nations match on the road in Edinburgh to throw in the uncapped Paddy Jackson rather than O’Gara to face a rejuvenated if limited Scottish side. Even more so given that he rejected the opportunity to promote Dave Kilcoyne from the bench to a starting front row in the absence of Cian Healy and parachuted in the more experienced Tom Court ahead of the Munster loosehead.
Yet while those decisions were found wanting, the emergence into a green jersey under Kidney’s watch of the likes of Jackson and Kilcoyne, of Simon Zebo and Craig Gilroy, and of Luke Marshall and Iain Henderson, are the sort of positives that make the Ireland job an attractive one for the next few years.
Dealing with IRFU committee men may not be so appealing, although, in fairness, as Donal Lenihan revealed in last week’s Irish Examiner, the governing body is addressing the issue by bring into being a Professional Game Board to manage the professional game on its behalf, taking the power away from the blazers that Kidney had to answer to and replacing it with people better experienced in the modern pro game to understand and respect the needs of a 21st Century national team head coach.
The sooner it arrives the better as the IRFU has so far failed for more than a year to appoint a full-time national scrummaging coach and is still yet to find the Performance Director it is seeking to sit on the soon to be implemented PGB.
Those are not wonderful precedents with which to impress a potential new and world-class head coach and it is a shame his newly departed predecessor did not get a chance to serve under the new hierarchy.
Maybe he should, in the manner of other organisations, have been moved on within the governing body he has served faithfully all these years. Perhaps he is the ideal man for that Performance Director role.
For Kidney is a decent and astute man who has brought much pleasure to Irish rugby fans by delivering two Heineken Cups to Munster and a first Grand Slam for Ireland since 1948. It would be a shame if his significant talents and breadth of experience at the highest levels of the professional game were to be ignored and Kidney lost to Irish rugby.
Les Kiss 5/1, Joe Schmidt 5/1, Jake White 8/1, Mike Ruddock 12/1, Vern Cotter 16/1, Conor O’Shea 20/1, Nick Mallett 25/1, Mark McCall 33/1, Eric Elwood 33/1.
Odds: Boylesports
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