Tadhg Beirne: I'm a better player now than I was before 2019 World Cup

After achieving something significant with Munster, Beirne is now ready to fight for more success with Ireland.

ALL SMILES: Tadhg Beirne during an Ireland rugby press conference at the IRFU High Performance Centre in Dublin. Photo by Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile

A wide smile creased Tadhg Beirne’s face when the Munster and Ireland forward was asked if, with such a narrow bridge separating the club and Test games, he had time to celebrate the province’s URC success.

You can bet he did. A stretch of three weeks separated that title win in Cape Town and the first day of pre-season under Andy Farrell’s watch and players seemed to slip a slew of weddings and holidays through that window.

Beers were had and hair was let down before business mode was flipped on again. Gavin Coombes' cheeky suggestion that they should wear their URC champions hats for the first day with Ireland was parked, but the feelgood factor still seeped in.

“It certainly lifted our spirits, that’s for sure. We have been to semi-finals and finals so many times over the years and lost, it can take a while to get over that,” said Beirne, one of nine Munster players in the preliminary World Cup squad.

“So you kind of feel the pain for the Leinster lads as well, what they went through. Just for us it gave us a little pep in our step coming in. We didn’t have our heads down like we have probably in the past. It was a nice feeling for us, for sure.”

Tadhg Beirne during training. Pic Credit ©INPHO/Ben Brady

Beirne missed three of Ireland’s Six Nations games in 2023 due to injury but he was ever-present this last 12 or so months when available so he was on hand for the series win in New Zealand, a perfect autumn and the defeats of Wales and France.

Iain Henderson is back fit and James Ryan remains a cornerstone of this Ireland side but Beirne will be hard to shift from the second row and there is a determination to make this World Cup a more fulfilling experience than his first in 2019.

Though he featured in all five games, the Kildare man was used off the bench against Scotland, Japan and New Zealand and there was an honest appraisal when he suggested that he just hadn’t done enough to put his hand up for a start in the big games.

He’s a different player now.

“I've learned an incredible amount over this World Cup cycle off all the coaches that have come in here. They've definitely made me a better player, a smarter player definitely.

“And I probably understand what we're trying to do a lot more than I did in 2019 and that's probably a credit to the coaching staff here and all the players I've played alongside. So I'd like to think I've become a better player and that's probably the biggest change.”

If he has his own personal reasons for targeting a better 2023 tournament then there is an abundance of players – and staff – among them who will be just as eager to replace the regrets of four years ago with a more upbeat World Cup chapter.

Ireland, lest we forget, opened their account in Japan with a convincing defeat of a cocky Scottish side in Yokohama but even that failed to shift the sense of demise and fragility around Joe Schmidt’s collective. It made for a dispiriting experience.

“It took a long time to get over it, I'd say. Yeah, it was fairly disappointing, to be honest. We had such expectations of ourselves and we probably felt like we didn't fire on all cylinders.

“Overall just disappointment from the get go. Even when you talk about warm-ups, we didn't particularly play well in them, did we? And that fed into the World Cup in terms of our performances over there.

“Afterwards it took a long, long time to get over it so I'm certainly hoping that's not the case this year and we'll be doing everything we can to change that.”