Farrell's juggling act puts Ireland where they want to be

BALANCING ASSETS: Ireland head coach Andy Farrell.

Paul O’Connell spoke to Sam Warburton on the Welshman’s ‘Captains’ podcast last month and it made for a quick and breezy 49 minutes as he dropped little nuggets about his days wearing the armband with Munster, Ireland and the British and Irish Lions.

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Your home for the latest news, views and analysis of this year's Six Nations Championship from our award winning sports team.

SIX NATIONS CHAMPIONSHIP

Your home for the latest news, views and analysis of this year's Six Nations Championship from our award winning sports team.

Embedded into the chat was the Ireland forwards coach’s thoughts on his pre-match speeches as a player. They weren’t all ‘fear of God’ classics. They couldn’t be, but he mined an interesting seam as he gathered his pack around him at the team hotel on Saturday morning.

SIX NATIONS CHAMPIONSHIP

Your home for the latest news, views and analysis of this year's Six Nations Championship from our award winning sports team.

SIX NATIONS CHAMPIONSHIP

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O’Connell and scrum coach John Fogarty had already chatted about how envious they were of their players. This was what they wanted to share with their forwards in the hours before their classic Six Nations tie with France.

The two coaches had won their fair share of trinkets between clubs and country. They had played under some of the best coaches to ever blow a whistle, competed alongside world-class players and in high-achieving groups and organisations. And they were jealous of these guys.

O’Connell declared himself to be positively green with envy when he stood back and considered the level at which Andy Farrell’s side was performing, at how aligned they all were to Andy Farrell’s game plan, and how far down the road they were as a collective.

“It’s exactly where we want to be,” said Dave Kilcoyne after the impressive defeat of the visitors later that day in Dublin. “You speak to any of the players in there and they will say they have never seen anything like it. It is just incredible to be a part of it. The sky is the limit for it.” 

They’re already flying pretty high. The 13-point win against France on Saturday means that this Irish team has now beaten every other ‘Tier 1’ side in the space of the last 12 months and, of course, they saw to the All Blacks twice. That alone is confirmation of their abilities which were stitched together across three separate Test windows.

Farrell can bring 33 players to the World Cup later this year and he has used 39 in those nine games against the world’s top teams going back to their evisceration of Italy in Dublin last February. Another four featured against Fiji and added to all that are those players who lined out with Emerging Ireland and the ‘A’ side late last year.

Every team pushes their own narrative on a given match week. Go back a few years and there was a piece of A4 discovered in the car park of the team hotel with a list of buzzwords and topics found by a member of the media on the day of a press conference and a lot of these bullet points carry little in the way of impact.

Others ring truer. One of the themes this Ireland collective has been promoting lately has centred on the week spent training in Portugal before the Six Nations opener in Wales. The party line is that there was no discernible difference between the firsts and the reserves when they faced up on the grass.

It already sounds a little trite by now but it’s not wrong. Farrell has used 23 different players off the bench in those ‘big’ games this last year and the names on the credits keep changing. Consider that three of those who closed out a three-point win over the world champion Springboks in November were nowhere near the action last weekend.

Jimmy O’Brien couldn’t make the matchday 23. Joey Carbery and Kieran Treadwell didn’t even make the Six Nations squad. Neither did Robert Baloucoune who started that game against South Africa. This is a key to how Ireland can beat France now when Tadhg Furlong and Jamison Gibson-Park and other regulars are out.

It is central to the reason why Ireland could lose Johnny Sexton with over half an hour to go against the French and still get the job done with Ross Byrne and Craig Casey fitting in seamlessly at half-back. Look at Tom O’Toole, a guy with little game time lately but burning it up with eight carries for over 50 yards in just 19 minutes.

“I've been in and around the squad for the last few years, and it's time to step up, and time to show that I'm capable at this level,” said O’Toole. “Tadhg is world-class and a great leader for the team, and Finlay (Bealham) has done exceptionally well coming into that role, so it was time for me to step up and add to the team.” 

It’s been quite the trick Farrell has managed: future-proofing his side with a punishing World Cup schedule in mind while beating everyone along the way. The rugby gods may yet have a cruel twist of fate up their sleeve come the autumn, but the scope for their mischief isn’t near what it once was.