The dreaded moment as Schmidt faces up to most ‘horrible’ of deadline calls
These are the hours Joe Schmidt has been dreading.
As difficult as the selection meetings with his coaching staff will have been yesterday, writing down 31 names on his list to submit to Rugby World Cup organisers today will have been a breeze for the head coach in comparison to telling nine unlucky players they will not be on the plane to Japan.
There will have been issues aplenty for the Ireland management to discuss following the penultimate summer series Test on Saturday when Ireland bounced back from their 57-15 England shellacking seven days previously to
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Though the Principality Stadium contest was between less than full-strength sides as agreed some weeks ago by Schmidt and opposite number Warren Gatland, both coaches will have seen this as an ideal opportunity to assess the depth of their squads heading into those final selection meetings.
By now, at the end of a four-year World Cup cycle, Schmidt will be confident he has settled on his first-choice XV and possibly most of his bench to get his final campaign up and running against Scotland at the International Stadium in Yokohama on Sunday, September 22, and it is expected the Aviva Stadium crowd will witness those frontline stars against a similarly fully-loaded Wales side when the two nations reconvene in Dublin this Saturday for the final Test before heading east to the Land of the Rising Sun.
Yet last Saturday’s workout in Cardiff will have, hopefully, helped him answer those remaining selection issues that will allow him to go to Japan with what he believes will be the best-equipped and well-balanced group of players to complete the objective of at least Ireland’s first semi-final appearance at the World Cup.
That will seem a very long way off for Schmidt this morning, though, as he takes the dreaded news to those nine players who will not be travelling as members of the 2019 Rugby World Cup squad.
Many of his peers, including New Zealand’s Steve Hansen, South Africa’s Rassie Erasmus and England’s Eddie Jones have already announced their final squads for the tournament, while Gatland unveiled his Wales selection yesterday and pool rival Gregor Townsend of Scotland is set to reveal his 31 tomorrow, the Ireland head coach’s fear of his omitted players discovering their fate other than from him means he hopes to keep his selection out of the public domain until next Sunday.
That will give him, he hopes, time to break the bad news personally.
“I think some players will definitely know, the ones that are within reach because I don’t want it floating too long.
One of the difficulties for us is when guys release teams or guys let people know, it would be a hell of a disappointment for players to find out via the media so that’s one of the considerations for me is to make sure I get to them first and they know first-hand from me who’s selected and, if they’ve missed out, why we’ve selected someone in front of them and the need we have for them to stay dialled in.
“Even with the 31, there’s every chance we’ll need two or three other guys in training. Thirty one isn’t that many to do training with and if anyone has cramp or got anything that’s untoward we will want to rest them for a couple of days so we’ll probably have a few spare players in anyway.
“So some but maybe not all decisions communicated.
“On Monday? It just depends how soon I can track them down and make the calls and if I can catch up with them face to face, that would be great, and, if not, just to make the phone calls to them.
“The thing is I know what’s going to happen, we’re going to go into a room and come up with 22 or 24 or 25 names and then we’re going to ‘oh OK, is it this or this or this guy?’ And that’s the really tricky bit, those last few names that are most complicated and they’re the finest lines to make decisions when there’s not too much between the players.”
Schmidt said on Saturday that the entire process would make for a “horrible couple of days”, based on the same experience in 2015, adding: “it’s probably the worst couple of days I’ve had in coaching, this time four years ago.”
He is sensitive to the effort and input from his players to make this squad and achieve what for most will be the pinnacle of their Test rugby careers and he will outline his decision-making process during those no doubt difficult conversations.
“Sometimes one player might miss out because we want to get this balance in our backrow or we want to make sure we’ve got a balance in our back three. That’s some of the conundrum.
“Sometimes, as an individual, I know, and I understand, sometimes you might say ‘I can’t believe he hasn’t picked this guy’ as opposed to someone else. He might have a left foot or a different persona or character on the pitch or a different set of skills on the pitch that we need to bring other people into the game. Sometimes those things can be overlooked a little bit. It’s hard to put all that balance together.”
Schmidt admitted to mistakes in the composition of his 2015 squad, which was struck by injuries and suspension to key players ahead of the quarter-finals at which stage Ireland crashed out to Argentina in Cardiff with inexperienced and untested players in some of those pivotal positions.
He accepted he could not have foreseen every eventuality and made reference to the Black Swan theory of randomness, “the impact of the highly improbable” as outlined by essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb in 2001.
Well, you only have to read a little bit of Nicholas Taleb to know how randomness can affect outcomes and the only certain way to know if you’ve made the right decisions is at the end of the tournament when you look back.
“There were a couple when I looked back, you think ‘you know what I probably could have done with this guy more than this guy and this guy more than this guy’.
“We’ve got to try to get that right, particularly this time, because we are so much further away. Last time Leinster were playing Scarlets and we grabbed three players from Leinster to fill in.
“Rhys Ruddock, Isaac Boss and Mike McCarthy, those three guys just slid right across. But, without any disrespect to those guys, they weren’t at the time, Paul O’Connell, Peter O’Mahony or the good thing with Isaac was we’d only taken two scrum-halves and we thought ‘right, we’ll get a bit more balance there because with other guys we’re not too badly off’.
“We’d lost Jared Payne obviously but other guys were still fit. Yeah, it’s a nightmare.”
Those brushes with randomness in 2015 have no doubt informed Schmidt’s thinking ever since, not least in the importance of not just his matchday 23 selection but numbers 24 to 31 in his squad to Japan.
“They are just so crucial. They are so crucial. I mean, in the end, they were the guys last time that we needed to be as good as they could be and I thought they did well when they’d overcome the shock of having to go out against an incredibly fired up and incredibly Argentinian side… (fly-half Nicolas) Sanchez was imperious at 10 and we had Ian Madigan who’d played six games in the last 12 months at 10 and he didn’t know he was playing until the day before the game because Johnny trained on the Friday and then we got a scan and he wasn’t quite right.
“So when there are those things, those colliding variables come together it makes it very tough and those 24 to 31 become so important.
“I’ve no doubt, they might not all be important at once like they were in that last World Cup but they’ll filter in and out and they’ll heighten in importance in different weeks as a guy gets a knock or maybe a couple of guys have to come in and someone else drops out.
“Maybe someone is not hitting his straps and he’s not in form and someone comes in and they’re bringing a bit of energy or he is in form and he’s training well because training for us is still a bit of an indicator of future performance.
“It’s not an assurance of future performance but it gives us an indication that they’re ready.”
Schmidt will need them to be ready with the pivotal game in the pool first up in 20 days but he had some issues to resolve first.
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