McCarthy's French tour de force shows it pays to play the long game

LONG GAME: Hugo Keenan and Joe McCarthy are late bloomers and showing the way that it can pay to play the long game. Pic: Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile

Scratch ever so lightly at the schadenfreude that accompanies what are now increasingly rare defeats by the Ireland senior men’s team and it wouldn’t be long in finding an obvious seam of reverse snobbery.

Not every detractor is guilty of it, but it’s there nonetheless.

The perception of a team heavily billeted with ranks of private school graduates doesn’t arise out of thin air. After all, nine of last year’s World Cup squad were sourced from just two Dublin fee-paying schools alone in Blackrock and St Michael’s.

If the Leinster Schools Cup route remains the most productive source of manpower (and it does), and if more players need to come through alternative pathways to the Test level (and they do), then the full picture is more nuanced.

Andy Farrell’s current squad is laced with players who took alternative paths.

Jamison Gibson-Park, James Lowe, Bundee Aki, Finlay Bealham and Tom O’Toole have all migrated from the far side of the world to be here. The likes of Jeremy Loughman and Nick Timoney had to switch province to find an alternative route to national honours.

Then there are the late bloomers. Tadhg Beirne was almost lost to the game until he started again with Scarlets in Wales and Calvin Nash just made his Test debut last week at the age of 26. Others blossomed late despite hothouse conditions.

Dan Sheehan went to school at Clongowes College but never featured in an Irish representative squad until a belated call to provide cover with the U20s. He barely just got an academy contract offer with Leinster. Now look at him.

Joe McCarthy and Hugo Keenan are similar.

Both walked the hallowed walls of Blackrock College but neither were ID'd as potential superstars early on. McCarthy was in the fourths at Junior Cup level, Keenan dabbled liberally in GAA and soccer and had two years playing sevens before landing on his feet.

As with most things, adversity can be harnessed positively.

“I think it grows into having a good work ethic and work rate,” says Keenan. “I always looked at it as trying to get on the next best team. I was just a competitive young lad by nature, and you can see from Joe that he is the exact same.

“Yeah, sometimes it not being handed to you easily makes you have that chip on your shoulder, some people call it, or that extra bit of drive to push on. But yeah, Joe has got brilliant energy and enthusiasm as well and I think that helps.” 

McCarthy, even more than Keenan, has more than made up for any lost time. Still only 22, his eye-popping performance against France in Marseille was just the 34th professional game he has played, but it has made him a star.

Keenan’s time as an unheralded member of his school’s rugby chorus didn’t allow him see anything others missed while McCarthy was coming up the ranks a few years behind him. There is a vague recollection of seeing him play Senior Cup, no more.

McCarthy’s impact only emphasizes the fact that different players mature at different times and in different ways but, if the rest of the world was gob smacked by his tour de force in the Six Nations opener, then Keenan had a feeling that the kid would be alright.

“Yeah, he was well able to embrace it. He was over in the World Cup. I know it’s his first Six Nations appearance but he’s a good few appearances for Ireland now and he’s been in the squad for the last year or two and developing and maturing.

“So I think he was ready and you’ve seen some of his performances with Leinster as well and this season he’s been brilliant. Some of the impacts he had in the World Cup as well. He’s been biding his time to start in the Six Nations and no surprises he took it.” 

The Irish system has been lauded for a long time and in any number of ways. Among them is the manner in which the relative lack in playing numbers here leaves the provinces and the union with little option but to invest heavily, in terms of time and patience, in their players.

Shouldn’t this be the norm regardless of resources? Just look at Josh van der Flier who had seven seasons behind him as a solid back row with Leinster and Ireland before elevating his game to the status of world’s best in 2022.

It pays to play the long game.