McCloskey: 'If I don’t get selected because I just play 12 then that’s just what it is'

Andy Farrell will announce his World Cup squad on August 28 and will be looking for players who are able to cover a number of positions for the tournament. 

Bank of Ireland Nations Series, Aviva Stadium, Dublin 5/8/2023

The air is starting to get thin now. New Zealand and England have just named their World Cup squads and Gregor Townsend has trimmed his working group to 37 with four players sent back to their clubs after Scotland’s weekend win against the French.

Joe Schmidt took a similar approach to Townsend four years ago when paring away at the preliminary group he had called up over the summer but Andy Farrell was non-committal when asked how he would handle the reduction in numbers this month.

As things stand, the Ireland head coach is planning on announcing his 33-man selection on August 28, two days after the team wraps up its warm-up schedule against Italy, England and Samoa.

This week sees the party housed in Portugal where a spell of warm-weather training and only a couple of remote media sessions are on the agenda, so it looks like being a time yet before we can stick a finger in the air and declare which way the wind is definitively blowing.

That said, the bones of the party are already in place with maybe up to 30 players all but inked in but the remaining places throw up endless possibilities. The discussion between the various coaches as they debate positional needs and various contingency plans would be fascinating.

The line being trumpeted publicly is that there is no tension in the camp as a result of all this pending drama, but the looking deadline can’t help but have players contemplating the maybes and the what ifs, not least those considered to be on the borderline.

“Yeah, I would say guys would lie to you and tell you no, (they’re not thinking about it), but I’m sure they do and that they’ve looked at squads. I know I have looked at squads in the past and at who normally goes and what the make-up of the squad will be.

“But, who knows who will be in it,” said Stuart McCloskey, the Ulster centre. “I’m sure you guys will name probable squads and all that and you probably won’t be too far off either the way this team has been going.” 

McCloskey is one of those widely believed to be part of a group whose fate is in the balance as the brains trust looks to squeeze every last drop out of its resources for a tournament that, if it goes to plan, will require seven games in as many weeks.

It took him over five years to earn his first six caps but just nine months to more than double that to 13 more recently so Farrell, Mike Catt and the rest of the staff clearly like what he can bring to the table even if Saturday’s effort against Italy wasn’t, by his own admission, his best.

McCloskey has clearly been one of those players who has done his homework on past selections, though, and he didn’t have to go back too far, only to 2019, to see how the land might lie when Farrell clears his throat and announces the final squad.

“Listen, four centres went to the last World Cup. Hopefully there’s four that go to this World Cup and I’m one of them. I started seven of the last nine/ten games at 12 and we have won them all. Hopefully that puts me in fairly good stead that I can be trusted in fairly big games.

“I felt I trained pretty well coming into this. Obviously it wasn’t my best game out there but it wasn’t a bad game by any stretch of the imagination. Hopefully I have shown I can really achieve and perform at this level over the last year or so.” 

Centre is an area of strength for Ireland, as it has been for some time.

Robbie Henshaw, Bundee Aki and Garry Ringrose have all shared an abundance of time together in the midfield, their interdependence and knowledge of the others aided by the injuries all of suffered at one point or another.

McCloskey has been a cult figure at the Kingspan for a decade now but he thought his shot at the Test arena had come and gone just over 15 months ago when, with his 30th birthday just around the corner, he was again conspicuous by his absence.

“Last summer, when I wasn’t involved in the tour to New Zealand, I probably thought that I wouldn’t play for Ireland too much again. To get that opportunity and come back in to play so many games has been a dream.

“I have really enjoyed being here. I just want to keep enjoying it while I’m here and hopefully I’ll get on that plane and play a pretty big role when we get out there in what should be a pretty big World Cup for us.” 

He had good reason to be resigned to his fate at the time. Farrell called up 40 players for what would prove to be an historic tour but McCloskey did get a late shout and did well on his appearance against the Maori in Wellington.

What’s changed for him? A stroke of luck, if anything. He certainly doesn’t feel as if he was doing anything vastly differently when Farrell went digging for his number last year and he isn’t trying to reinvent himself now either.

Ireland have a handful of players other than Henshaw, Aki and Ringrose who can slot in at midfield other than McCloskey who is a specialist inside-centre.

Jimmy O’Brien, Keith Earls and Jack Crowley are just some who offer that option. That doesn’t work in the Ulsterman’s favour but he’ll make the point too that Aki and Henshaw can play 13 just as well as 12. That others can fit around him.

“I like to play 12 pretty well, and I think I’ve played it very well over the last ten years of professional rugby, so it is what it is. If I don’t get selected because I just play 12 then that’s just what it is.”