First back to back losses since 2011!
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They beat them in a competitive game too and not some Mickey mouse game in soldier field. I wonder will the Argentinians be releasing a DVD in time for Christmas.
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Cheika will have enjoyed that
Ah that’s lovely
Petaia unlucky there for Oz
Probably the two most entertaining teams to watch in international rugby at the minute
Bit of an arm-wrestle today, not much room out there. Argentina defending well again this week
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Have Ireland anyone that can raise a gallop at all? Jonny May wandered over and back the field there
Ah lads
Another 5m lineout for ireland. Danger here
It could be a long afternoon
Keet nearly
Keith Earls must be 35 and he’s the best of them. In fairness you’ve leinsters second choice half backs steering the ship so we can’t expect much.
Not watching it, but are going out on our shields with our boots on.
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We’re fronting up
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Embarrassing from the little hobbit playing scrum half for Ireland
Not good enough that IRFU kicks for touch on schools rugby
Johnny Watterson
The machine gun turret freely wheeled these past few weeks strafing the rugby hinterland. Eddie Jones’s cheap shot at the Irish UN team, attack coach Mike Catt and the lack of visibly attacking Georgia, Johnny Sexton’s age, Andy Farrell’s roadmap to where he is leading the Irish team and this week that shyest of creatures the perennial David Nucifora, who only the most ardent rugby fan knows, emerged from IRFU HQ. Performance director Nucifora took some rounds too after a media briefing.
His answer to a question on schools rugby that he was too busy running the professional game to talk about it, on the face of it seemed like an opportunity missed. It surely would not have bypassed Nucifora that last month nine players on a Leinster Pro14 squad all came from the same Dublin school, St Michael’s College. That was, apparently, a record.
Cian Kelleher, Rory O’Loughlin, Harry Byrne, Luke McGrath, Ross Molony, Josh Murphy, Scott Penny, Jack Dunne and Dan Leavy were among the starting team and replacements that faced Glasgow in Scotstoun and beat them 19-32.
Maybe the attitude is that the school system is doing just fine as the youngsters, almost fully formed professionals, tumble out of the Ballsbridge academy and into paid rugby as quickly as Leinster can absorb them. As the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
The Dublin schools have become virtual academies. Not only are the players well educated, but the rugby coaching and facilities are professional level. Kudos to the school, their system and the coaching staff.
Desirable
But it would have been interesting to know if the Ireland performance director believed that to be a good thing for Irish rugby. Is it desirable that one Dublin school should have such an influence on the professional game? Is that not too narrow a base? Is it not too homogeneous in ethos, thinking, innovation and diversity?
When Celtic became the first British team to win the European Cup in 1967 manager Jock Stein did it after inheriting a side that was full of local lads, with whom he had worked in the youth side and – before his arrival – had been out of favour with the previous coach.
Fourteen 14 of the 15 players involved in that campaign came from within a 10-mile radius of Celtic Park. Only Bobby Lennox, who Stein signed from Hearts, came from further afield – Saltcoats, which was some 30 miles away.
But the Celtic story of local lads conquering Europe is looked on over 50 years later as a quaint piece of history and Celtic a metaphor for uncomplicated times. No modern club in football could conceive of winning in Europe working off such a small footprint.
Enlightening
A colleague likes to compare any sports team to his favourite brand of gin, Monkey 47, enlightening all who listen that the more botanicals you have in it the better the flavour. Recently, Ross Molony was asked about the nine players and said he believed it was because of the coaching in the school. He added that you would not be able to walk into a Leinster training session and pick out the players by their rugby who had been coached by the school’s director of rugby Andy Skehan.
It’s a fair point and nobody is calling them automatons or instruments of just one way of thinking about the game. But further up the food chain with Ireland does a highly concentrated base cause issues?
The Irish team have reached a glass ceiling at world cups and cannot get beyond the quarter-final stage. In the early years all the players were Irish. Pure and simple. Quarter-final. Then the Irish qualified-players began to arrive. Quarter-final. Then the residency players kicked in. Quarter-final. Cue Jones’s UN dig. The misses in the early years were considered a “disaster” by the IRFU, but in latter years they have come to look increasingly inevitable.
A 2015 McKinsey report on 366 public companies found that those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 35 per cent more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean. And those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15 per cent more likely to have returns above the industry mean.
More recently the Harvard Review reported on a body of research that revealed another, more nuanced benefit of workplace diversity.
Overcome
“Non-homogenous teams are simply smarter,” it said. “Working with people who are different from you may challenge your brain to overcome its stale ways of thinking and sharpen its performance. Creating a more diverse workplace will help to keep your team members’ biases in check and make them question their assumptions.”
There is no reason business thinking should not translate to sport. The strength of any team is how they relate to each other physically and mentally. But also their botanicals. The strike rate of St Michael’s especially and a few other schools in getting players into professional contracts reflects either the poverty of an IRFU expansion policy or a disparity of resources between schools.
Nine players is an exceptional achievement. But much like Stein’s Celtic of ’67, also at odds with stuff the Harvard Review mentioned – multiformity, variance, heterogenity. That’s why Nucifora might have expanded on his answer a little more than batting it back because he was too busy running the professional game.
God be the days when they were the bottler Junior School.
Impasse leads agents to offer top Irish players to French clubs
IRFU PERFORMANCE DIRECTOR DAVID NUCIFORA SAID ‘IT’S JUST ABOUT THE BUSINESS BEING RESPONSIBLE’. PHOTOGRAPH: INPHO
Agents believe IRFU is refusing to negotiate until foreign clubs have completed their recruitment
Gavin Cummiskey
The IRFU’s refusal to enter negotiations despite 50 per cent of their professional players being out of contract next July has led to agents offering some of Ireland’s top internationals to French clubs.
The agents believe their hands have been forced. “In the next couple of weeks we will have firm offers from clubs in France and the IRFU have not engaged or made any offers at all,” said a senior sports agent. “It’s seems absolutely bonkers.”
The Irish Times has spoken to several leading rugby agents – all spoke anonymously to avoid damaging their clients’ future prospects – and many believe that IRFU performance director David Nucifora is stalling talks until French and English clubs have completed recruitment for next season.
“Is [Nucifora] waiting for French and English clubs to do their business? Of course he is,” said another agent. “It is nothing to do with money. The IRFU leave the negotiations as long as they can because they know there will be less options.”
Nucifora is refusing to meet player representatives even in an informal setting.
A veteran Irish international also says that “very limited information” is being relayed to players. And there is a growing fear that they are missing out on opportunities to move abroad which, in turn, allows the IRFU to come in with “a low-ball offer when other options have evaporated”.
Financial position
Another agent, however, expressed sympathy for Nucifora’s inability to fully know the IRFU’s financial position until the Government makes a decision on crowds returning to stadiums in 2021.
“It has actually worked out very well for players to be aware of their options outside of Ireland. Normally the top-end players don’t get this opportunity as the IRFU and the provinces are very proactive in initiating contract discussions,” said the agent
Initial conversations have occurred between agents and the provinces, so players could be informed that they are wanted. However, no financial offers can be made until Nucifora says so despite up to 100 professionals being out of contract next summer.
The performance director said on Monday there will be no discussions until after Christmas.
An agent also noted that “positive news around vaccines and the likelihood of crowds returning before next season” would alter the value of each deal.
Nucifora, who has administered the professional game in Ireland since 2014, reiterated this week that selection for Ireland will only be open to players contracted to Connacht, Leinster, Munster and Ulster.
Another agent cannot understand why Nucifora – the twice capped Wallaby hooker – has not chosen to negotiate contracts that can be increased or reduced based on income the IRFU earns from supporters entering stadiums next year.
“There is a way of dealing with that if the IRFU say, ‘here is the offer we are willing to give in normal circumstances – that is your value – but there is a phased reduction that goes up and down whether we are at 25 per cent, 50 per cent or 100 per cent capacity.’ ”
Influential young players like Garry Ringrose, James Ryan and Jacob Stockdale signed lucrative deals last season but several veterans are facing into a worrying financial period as the IRFU refuses to engage in discussions.
“I know there is a lot of frustration on the players going into Christmas with no security.”
Performance anxiety
Contractual limbo is likely to increase stress levels within the national squad. The failures of 2019 were largely put down to “performance anxiety”, and head coach Andy Farrell has revealed that sports psychologist Gary Keegan is working on the squad’s mental skills, while former team manager Mick Kearney continues to pair players with business mentors to prepare for a post-rugby career. Keegan previously worked with Leinster, the Dublin footballers, the Tipperary hurlers and Irish boxers at the Athens and Beijing Olympics.
“For a lot of our players it isn’t just the stress of a match week, they are dealing with life outside of rugby that can build up in a different manner,” said Farrell. “I know where everyone is at individually but, honestly, from the feeling in the group you would never know that is at the forefront of their mind, which is a massive credit to them.”
To the suggestion that one-year deals might satisfy veterans like Peter O’Mahony, Johnny Sexton, Tadhg Furlong, Keith Earls, Iain Henderson, CJ Stander and Cian Healy, in the hope of a financial recovery 12 months from now, an agent replied: “One-year deals don’t work. You can’t be advising that unless the player is in the absolute twilight of his career, like a Dan Carter-type figure, who has only has one more season in him.
“If you get offered a one year contract you know you will be back having the same conversation next Christmas. I would really hope the IRFU are more long sighted than that.”
Media reports have already linked Ben Healy, the 21-year-old Munster outhalf who qualifies for Scotland via family, to Glasgow Warriors. Healy, and several more senior players, will be seeking an meeting with Nucifora before Glasgow and the other foreign clubs fill their rosters.
“I suppose it’s just about the business being responsible and making sure that we are in a position when we do enter into negotiations [that] we know exactly where we stand and anything we put on the table we will be able to stand up with our players,” said Nucifora on Monday.