DAVID HUMPHREYS IS no longer the IRFU’s incoming performance director. He formally started in the role at the beginning of this month, having spent three months shadowing his predecessor, David Nucifora.
Nucifora is still the outgoing performance director. His tenure concludes after the Olympics at the end of July when he hopes his commitment to 7s rugby is rewarded with a medal from at least one of the men’s and women’s teams in Paris.
Nucifora will head back to Australia without any great outpouring of public gratitude. Irish rugby has been highly successful on his watch since 2014, particularly the senior and U20 men’s Ireland teams, but he has never been afraid of upsetting the applecart. Indeed, he has openly welcomed friction within the Irish rugby system.
Humphreys is an affable character and seems determined to be communicative with the media and supporters about what the IRFU does, but those who have worked with him speak of a hard edge too. Good manners don’t mean the former Ireland out-half can’t make hard decisions and be blunt when he needs to be.
A thick skin is one of the prerequisites for the role, as Nucifora could underline to Humphreys. Decisions that benefit Ireland’s national teams will invariably frustrate someone, whether it’s provinces, clubs, coaches, administrators, or even IRFU committee members.
Humphreys is now in an extremely high-powered position within Irish rugby. The 52-year-old struck an optimistic tone at the Aviva Stadium as he spoke at the launch of the IRFU’s new strategic plan for 2024 to 2028.
Nucifora would have hoped to be the one to oversee Ireland breaking their World Cup quarter-final ceiling but it wasn’t to be. Humphreys’ job involves making sure Ireland are ready for another shot in 2027.
Discussing the three-month handover period with Nucifora, Humphreys joked that “any bad decisions, I can still say that’s David Nucifora’s fault!” but he knows the buck stops with him now.
In a departure from previous strategic plans, the latest document from the IRFU doesn’t include specific targets for Ireland and the four provinces when it comes to trophies. There will be key performance indicators [KPIs] included in the union’s annual reports, but it seems a less rigid way of doing it.
The most recent strategic plan did have such objectives and those that were missed became a rod with which to beat Nucifora.
“Coming in from the outside, I was very strong in terms of not having really specific KPIs,” said Humphreys.
“If you look at the 2018 to 2023 strategic plan and what was set out there, I don’t think any of us would sit here and say that Irish rugby isn’t in a better place today than it was at the beginning of 2018 regardless of what we have and haven’t won, so that’s a very important part of it.”
Irish rugby is clearly in a good place. Humphreys’ gig is to keep the show on the road and streamline a few things along the way.
He points out that it’s almost 10 years to the day since he left his position as Ulster’s director of rugby, so he has returned with fresh thoughts. Humphreys has been with Gloucester, Georgia, and English cricket in the intervening years, meaning he brings different experiences to the party.
He stressed that he came back without “pre-conceived ideas” and has already seen how the IRFU has been doing some things very well but could do others “very differently.”
Humphreys is enthused by the quality of players coming through Irish rugby’s pipeline, even if he believes the union and its provinces can do more when it comes to player development.
“If you look at where Ireland have been in terms of world ranking or Grand Slams, they are competing and the players coming through are, in my opinion, a generational group of players,” said Humphreys.
“We have to make sure that all four provinces are in position to deliver players as they have in the last 150 years.
“There is a lot of talk about Leinster, the fact that they are overproducing players. In a high-performance system, you can’t overproduce players. We want all our provinces producing more and more players to make Andy Farrell’s decision-making and the four provincial head coaches’ decision-making much more difficult.
“A smaller group of players doesn’t pose those challenges. We want to get to the stage where all four provinces are delivering more players than they are at the moment.”
The reality is that Irish rugby has been reliant on private schools to produce players and Humphreys is keen for the net to be widened. That would mean a bigger playing pool but also players who bring different skills to the party.
Unprompted, Humphreys pointed out that players who weren’t born in Ireland are now providing the most obvious attacking spark for Andy Farrell’s national team.
“You only need to look at the Irish team that goes out there to see that the X-factor comes from Jamison Gibson-Park, Bundee Aki, James Lowe. The three-year residency is now gone, it is five years.
“I don’t think that you are going to see the same, not just in Ireland but across the world, who rely on it more than we do. Because of that challenge, we have to have our own system here producing not just more but better players across the system.
“We have to be creative where we go and find players whether that is from other sports, which we will continue to do and try and do it better.”
It’s intriguing that Humphreys mentions the IRFU looking at other sports for athletes who could switch codes or at least focus on rugby over other early sporting interests.
This is already happening, with several talented former minor GAA stars coming through the rugby ranks, but it sounds like there may be more of it in the future. Humphreys admitted he doesn’t have “solid, strong ideas” yet but we will be watching this space.
The IRFU performance director stressed that Irish rugby has to broaden its catchment area in the coming years.
“We are a sport that can’t rely on the private schools,” said Humphreys.
“They have always been central to producing players for Irish rugby long before the game went professional. Since going professional, they have been an increasingly important part. In my view, I wouldn’t say always but for the foreseeable future they will play that role.”
One of the issues that repeatedly came up during Nucifora’s time was player movement between the Irish provinces, or rather the lack thereof. The Australian repeatedly intimated that he’d like to see players move more freely when they weren’t first-choice at one province.
This relates most prominently to Leinster. Several of their players have turned down the chance to switch provinces to stay with their native team even though they’re not first-choice.
The current debate in Irish rugby is around what the IRFU and Leinster should do about the eastern province’s multiple options at out-half, particularly given that Connacht need a player in that position for next season.
Humphreys didn’t get into specifics on this topic but he stressed that the union wouldn’t force a player to move. That said, he suggested that someone being happy to play second-fiddle for their province might influence how Farrell viewed them.
“It’s a really emotive issue in Irish rugby and I get why it is, but I don’t think there is one single answer or set of principles that you can say, ‘This is where we’re going to go forward,” said Humphreys.
“To give you a sense of where I’m coming from, when you look at the players in our system, number one: we must give them the best opportunity to perform in an Irish shirt. Number two: we’ve got to give our provinces the best chance to win URC and win Europe.
“I’m driven that provincial success and national success aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s actually the complete opposite. We need our provinces to be competitive so Ireland continue to get to where they’ve got to.
“But there will be times when we’ve got to get players game time. The game is the best coach. Without getting into specifics, we have to sit down with the province and look at what’s best for the national team and the province.
“I will never move a player against their will. We will never move a player under contract against their will. It goes back to that identity piece. Where you have a player who we believe could be performing out there sitting in third, fourth or fifth in the province and not getting the game time that they need to develop, that’s sending a strong message about that player’s ambition to Andy Farrell and the people who pick the team.
“We want players who are competitive, who are going to give it everything they have to play for Ireland. If they choose not to do that for whatever reason, so be it.”
Irish rugby has had success stories with bringing Irish-qualified players to these shores, most notably with Mack Hansen in recent times, and the IRFU and its provinces will continue to look abroad for good players who are eligible.
But Humphreys said the IQ Rugby department of the union is “part of an ongoing review” as they figure out how that element of the IRFU is contributing.
One thing that is certain is that Emerging Ireland will be in South Africa in early October, the Irish development tour clashing with the URC season again.
It caused major frustration for the provinces in 2022 when the Emerging Ireland side was relaunched but Humphreys hopes that situation has been avoided with advance notice.
“I wasn’t part of those decisions, but I think the tour happened at quite short notice which caused some challenges for preparation at the start of the season,” said Humphreys.
“All the provinces want to get off to a good start, so by announcing it last week we’ve gone very early.
“They know the coaching team, we’ll give them a broad indication of the group of players we’re looking at so they’ll know what they have to do to approach weeks one, two, three and four of the URC.”
It remains to be seen if more Ireland A fixtures follow during senior side Test windows, but Humphreys said he can see “real value in A team rugby.”
Speaking of which, the provincial A teams are set to have six fixtures each next season, with the IRFU working to figure out where those inter-pro clashes fit in the calendar given that the Emerging Ireland tour has already added an extra burden.
All-Ireland League clubs will be hoping those provincial A games don’t clash with their fixtures, which has been a huge point of frustration in the past.
Humphreys stated his belief that the AIL has a big part to play in producing international players, especially given how academy youngsters get the majority of their rugby in the league.
“The game is the best coach, we can talk all the time about our best systems but we’ve got to see players play,” he said.
“I very, very much see a strong mix of All Ireland League, A team rugby, and provincial rugby in preparing players to play in a green jersey.
“That will change year-to-year depending on the demands of the group of players that we have in place, as part of that performance integration between national and provincial. What we’re trying to work out is what does the performance part actually include?
“Very loosely, we’re starting to look at Schools Cup teams, All Ireland League Division 1 teams, because I think we’d all agree the quality of AIL Division 1 rugby this year has been very, very good and there’s certainly a good preparation for players to play U20s and university to play All Ireland League 1 into provincial.”
As well as focusing on players, Humphreys’ role involves overseeing the development of Irish coaches.
Richie Murphy being appointed as Ulster’s head coach is a big success story in this regard, with IRFU head of high performance coach development Darragh Sheridan working to help guide others like Murphy. Humphreys also highlighted the need to stay in close contact with Irish coaches and staff based abroad.
He has his hands full.
