Tadhg Beirne springs into action as Andy Farrell’s Ireland showing comfort in chaos

Ireland's Tadhg Beirne scores a try despite Ignacio Calles of Argentina. Picture: INPHO/James Crombie

Andy Farrell has made it his business to empower players so that they can play what they see in front of them.

Stuart Lancaster has made it a priority that his Leinster players, many of them on national duty this month, can be utterly comfortable in chaos.

Both are theories put forward to deal with the unforeseen on the field of play, but Ireland’s players and their coaches faced a handful of left-field quandaries long before the anthems were struck at the Aviva Stadium.

No one was tested more than Tadhg Beirne.

Initially named on the bench as cover for the second row, the Munster forward found his brief expanding when Jack Conan went down during the captain’s run, again when Iain Henderson got injured in the warm-up, and once more when James Ryan went off injured.

“It’s a bit surprising, but you always have to prepare for those moments,” Beirne explained.

“Any situation could happen. When Jack pulled out with a tight quad, I got a call off Faz, and I had to meet him and the coaches to talk through the 6 and 8 role.

“I spent the next 24 hours just going through that in my head, and trying to get that laid down, and making sure I knew those roles like the back of my hand.

“I felt comfortable going into the game and the warm-up, and then obviously Hendy pulled up, and I was thrown into that 4 position, but I did the work during the week, and I was just excited to get out there.

“Then there is another spanner in the works when James went down with a HIA, and I went from 4 to 5.

“A lot of shifting, but everyone dealt with that really well.”

Others to find themselves with radically altered plans were Nick Timoney and Ryan Baird, both of them parachuted into the matchday 23 as a result of the injuries and the promotions into the side of Beirne and Peter O’Mahony.

Timoney’s day started in Belfast where he had returned on Thursday after training with the national squad in Dublin. He was disappointed driving back up to Ulster, the November window having seemingly passed without any game time banked.

He was still in the leaba, and thinking about a lie-in, when the call came from Farrell shortly before 8am.

He sat into the car “about 12.5 minutes” later and made for Dublin under the impression that he would be acting as 24th man. Henderson had yet to come unstuck at that point, so there were no thoughts of game time as he stopped off for a croissant and protein bar at a petrol station and picked up his Ireland gear from where he had left it with his parents in Dublin.

Hours later and he had a second cap to his name. It was all a bit of a blur.

“My good friend David O’Connor was over in my house last night and we were watching the All Blacks, and he was sort of saying: ‘Maybe we could watch the Ireland game somewhere’, either in my house or somewhere else,” said Timoney.

“I got a text from him maybe 45 minutes before kick-off, and he was like: ‘Here, what’s the craic, will I come over?’

“He obviously realised at some point that I wasn’t responding to him! He was probably annoyed for a few minutes before realising what happened.”

O’Mahony, whose career has been a series of migrations across the entirety of the back row, played it down when asked how he had handled his own changing briefs over the weekend, but Farrell himself was more forthright.

“He’d be humble enough not to say that it’s tough,” said Farrell. “It is tough because he has to be across three positions, and he knows them inside out.”

Ireland weren’t perfect against the Pumas, but the manner in which they put away an admittedly tired and increasingly frustrated opponent bodes well, even without the wider context of the preceding weeks and results.

The average age of the side that finished yesterday’s game came to just 24, with the likes of Craig Casey, Harry Byrne, Dan Sheehan, Tom O’Toole, and Timoney all plugging into the switchboard without anything in the way of a drop in power.

“Oh, like, it was unbelievable,” said Timoney. “I only found out just before kick-off that I’d be playing. As soon as that happened, I had Jack Conan, Tadhg Beirne, Paul O’Connell, and all those lads saying: ‘Listen, we understand you mightn’t have everything in your head, because you weren’t expecting this’.

“But the first 10, 15 minutes of the game I was just sitting with Jack, he was just talking to me. It was stuff that you know, but we were just running through it, just having that calm voice there talking you through stuff was unreal. From my point of view, it was an unbelievable day to have a group like that to help you out.”