The first thing to say about the bingo bus of Ireland coaches heading off on a skite with the Lions this summer is that it will probably be fine. Ireland’s tour of Georgia and Portugal in July will come and go and the gang will all get back together in plenty of time for the All Blacks in November in Chicago.
Chances are, results will go as expected. The Lions will probably win the series in Australia and Ireland will surely take care of business in Europe. Everybody will be grand.
Still feels a bit off though, doesn’t it? Like that moment halfway through the Saturday of a stag party when you look around and realise that a couple of lads slipping out for a burger has morphed into a sudden split in the group. Half your mates are now off at a full-on rave on the other side of town while you’re in a dutiful round with the groom’s brothers-in-law, listening to them swap ideas for under-9 coaching drills.
Have the Lions left Ireland in the lurch?
Andy Farrell is gone. Simon Easterby, who the IRFU said just 11 weeks ago would be Ireland’s head coach for the two summer Tests, is gone. John Fogarty (scrum), Andrew Goodman (attack), Vinny Hammond (head of analytics) and Aled Walters (head of athletic performance) are all out the gap as well.
And godspeed to them all, of course. Hopefully they will be spared the long and proud history of Irish Lions getting shat upon from a great height by the English media at the first sign of trouble on tour. But they’re big boys and well fit for it. With a bit of luck, they’ll come back as better coaches in the autumn.
Aren’t we very generous to be sending them on their way, all the same? Ireland have just had a poor Six Nations, after all. Third in the table, thoroughly schooled by France, gasping for the end against Italy. In those final two games, they looked every inch a team that was getting old together, casting the summer tour in a far more interesting light than had been the case.
This is a squad that is going to get refreshed before the 2027 World Cup, whether it likes it or not. This is part of that process. Jack Conan, James Ryan, Andrew Porter and Jacob Stockdale went to Japan in June 2017 with five caps between the four of them. While the mainstays of the Ireland team were away with the Lions, their replacements were getting their legs under them.
Same thing this time around against Georgia and Portugal. Pick your Lions squad now – how many of the Irish players on the plane will be under 30? Dan Sheehan, Joe McCarthy, Caelan Doris, Hugo Keenan – plus Porter, who is 29. Most of the others will be between 33 and 36 when the World Cup comes around.
If this is the summer where their backups step forward, wouldn’t it be better for them to be doing it alongside at least some of the coaches who are going to be there for the rest of the journey? Instead, Paul O’Connell is being tasked with bringing them in at the same time as a mixum-gatherum of new coaches who, no more than themselves, are going to be learning international rugby on the fly.
[ Paul O’Connell confirmed as Ireland’s interim head coach for summer’s TestsOpens in new window ]
The whole set-up doesn’t seem particularly fair on anyone, least of all the new interim, interim boss. O’Connell’s first head coaching job is not some carefully-constructed succession plan. It’s not like he has been building up to this in conjunction with Farrell and Easterby and David Humphreys from a long way out. This is much more a case of the boys tossing him the keys as they head off to the airport and telling him to keep it between the ditches until they come back.
But hang on. This is Paul O’Connell we’re talking about. One of the great totems of Irish sport, a figure some of us still feel like bowing in front of when we cross his path. So why does this feel like he’s being thrown a hospital pass here?
Finding qualified candidates to put their hands up and help him out won’t be a problem – it’s an international rugby gig after all. If you have designs on making it in elite sport, it’s where you want to be.
But that’s not the point at all. The point is, O’Connell will have a few weeks to pull together all the different strands of what makes an international tour work without five of the most important people in the set-up. This isn’t like Easterby taking Ireland for the Six Nations, where he was stepping up to lead a well-oiled machine and where everybody knew everybody already.
O’Connell will be dealing with new faces in the playing staff, in the coaching staff, in the analysis room, most of whom know they’re probably only seat-warmers anyway. It doesn’t exactly feel conducive to a high-performance environment. He deserves better for his first stint in the big chair.
But also, this orgy of genuflection to the Lions is a bit much at this stage, no? Didn’t we learn that last time out in South Africa? That series confirmed for everyone that the Lions is a cash-cow first and foremost, a commercial juggernaut driven for the benefit of sponsors and TV companies as much as for players.
The days of innocence are long gone, the upstart beauty of four plucky nations coming together to take on a southern hemisphere behemoth has been routed. Who even remembers the details any more?
Quick, top of the head – who was the only Irish player to play every minute of the 2021 Test series?
A shiny penny if you were able to come up with Robbie Henshaw. In June 2013, while Brian O’Driscoll was on the Lions tour in Australia, the self same Henshaw made his Ireland debut against the USA in Houston in front of new Ireland coach Joe Schmidt.
The games this summer aren’t the be-all and end-all. But don’t imagine they don’t matter.
