Now in opposing camps, Goodman keen on battle with mentor 'Razor'

PLOTTING: Head coach Andy Farrell, left, and assistant coach Andrew Goodman during an Ireland Rugby squad training session at The Campus in Quinta da Lago. Pic: Seb Daly/Sportsfile

And so the tables turn. If Joe Schmidt was the man with the insider’s view when Ireland and New Zealand met in last autumn’s Rugby World Cup quarter-final then it’s Andrew Goodman who offers that particular angle as the teams go at it again in Dublin on Friday.

Schmidt was the talk of the town prior to that meeting in Stade de France last year, so much so that it felt like his influence as All Blacks assistant coach after such a hugely successful tenure with Ireland had been completely overblown.

It wasn’t.

That renowned attention to detail was never more obvious than in the 53rd-minute when out-half Richie Mo’unga shot through the Irish defence off a lineout before feeding Will Jordan for a superb, trademark Schmidt powerplay.

The Kiwis won by four points.

Now head coach with the Wallabies, Schmidt’s fingerprints have been smudged by the passing of time and Scott Robertson’s ascension to the top job with this week’s visitors to the Aviva Stadium. 

And so enter Goodman.

Ireland’s new attack coach spent five seasons under Robertson at the Crusaders and in a variety of roles: defence, backs, technical development. He doesn’t carry Schmidt’s profile but surely that level of knowledge should count for … something?

“Razor was a big mentor to me. He gave me my opportunity at the Crusaders and he’s someone I learned a great deal off so I’ve got huge respect for Razor and all of his coaching group. I’ve worked alongside all of them. It's going to be great to go to battle with them.

“It works both ways: they know me well also. There’s little things you’ll look to maybe think about how they might do different areas of the game, or what they might bring but it's Test rugby, it’s a different level to what we were playing in Super Rugby in New Zealand.

“So it was a different game. The game has kind of moved on and evolved a lot over the last couple of years.” 

What’s interesting about what is now one of rugby’s biggest modern rivalries is that, while Ireland have won five and lost four going back to Chicago in 2016, only one of those nine meetings has been a single-score game.

New Zealand have had the better of the two World Cup knockout ties in that time but Ireland have enjoyed plenty of success with ball in hand. This will be a first opportunity for Goodman to pick up on where his predecessor Mike Catt left off.

It’s both a lovely starting point and one loaded with pressure.

“Ireland is doing a lot of great things through the attack side of the game, [which is] where I’ve come in to assist. So I’ve got to evolve the game. Little bits of what we’re training, what we’re doing every day, hopefully will start to come through from this Test match on.

“I probably won’t say too much more than that but hopefully you’ll be able to see the proof in the games as they come up over the November series.” 

Goodman got his feet under the table during the summer when he shadowed Catt for the drawn two-Test tour of South Africa. And he got to work with most of Farrell’s staff on the Emerging Ireland tour to the same country more recently.

That first of those trips was just as beneficial in building relationships and few will be more important to Goodman going forward than the one with Jack Crowley with whom he drank coffee and shared thoughts on the game back in July.

Crowley is an impressive and confident operator but the club season to date hasn’t been plain sailing for him at Munster and he still has only 16 caps to his credit, six of which have come from off the bench. He is not yet the finished article.

Ciaran Frawley is next in line with fewer caps again – just six – while Sam Prendergast brings big expectations but nothing in the way of Test experience to the table ahead of a month where Ireland will also face Argentina, Fiji and Australia.

Replacing Johnny Sexton was always going to be a journey and Farrell has gone about it by co-opting the former No.10 and captain onto the coaching ticket in an informal capacity for the November internationals. The out-halves will be an obvious point of contact.

“We’ve only been together for a couple of weeks and Johnny was in last week so it is great to have him around first and foremost and he will be around for another day or two this week,” said Goodman. “He’s helping tens and doing work around their goalkicking.

“We have three tens relatively inexperienced at Test level so to have someone with 120-plus caps to come in and sit down with them and talk through scenarios is going to be massive. He will add a lot to the coaching group as well with that experience.”