INTERNALLY, ANDY FARRELL tells his players that the next game is always the biggest game in Irish rugby history.
When Murray Kinsella of this parish asked the head coach at a press conference on Thursday why he feels that applies to today’s second test against South Africa in Durban, Farrell replied: “Because we’re playing against the world no.1 at home after we’ve lost a game. We don’t tend to lose two on the bounce very much.”
True enough. Indeed, only once during Farrell’s four-and-a-half-year tenure have Ireland lost consecutive tests, behind closed doors versus Wales and France at the start of the 2021 Six Nations (a second-string squad also lost to New Zealand Maori in a non-capped international before Ireland’s defeat to the All Blacks in the first test on the 2022 tour of New Zealand).
You have to swing back as far as their last tour of South Africa in 2016 for the second most recent example of Ireland suffering back-to-back defeats. Of Joe Schmidt’s matchday 23 from the third test in Port Elizabeth that year, only four players in Conor Murray, Tadhg Furlong, Finlay Bealham and Iain Henderson — the latter injured for this summer’s tour — remain in the fold.
Ireland have taken home series wins from their last two summer visits to traditional Tri Nations sides. They’ve won at least a test on their last three ‘big’ tours. Victories in Cape Town (2016), Melbourne and Sydney (2018), and Dunedin and Wellington (2022), have been key boxes ticked on Ireland’s decade-long path towards being considered a power in their own right.
As such, to return empty-handed tomorrow would feel like a significant step backwards to a group of players accustomed to rebounding from rare defeats, the vast majority of whom had never lost to South Africa until last Saturday.
The rest of us would probably be able to make peace with that eventuality: these Boks are the best we’ve seen in the professional era and their victory over Ireland in the first test seemed to feel utterly cathartic. Rassie and co. had for weeks given the game the big sell and still we probably underestimated the extent to which South African rugby viewed Ireland as a monkey that it needed to reef off its back by any means necessary.
Last Saturday was also the Springboks’ first chance to parade their world-title belt around the ring in front of their own fans, an opportunity of which they were bereaved by Covid following their 2019 success.
Ireland would forever deny it but the first test frankly meant more to South Africa. The reverse should be true of the second.
It’s been a longer season for Ireland than it has been for their hosts, whose hemispheric championship doesn’t kick off until August. One wonders if, on some subconscious level, it felt longer for the fact that Andy Farrell insisted that this year’s Six Nations was not a fresh start after the devastation of Ireland’s World Cup exit but the continuation of the same journey.
His players have effectively been on the go for a full calendar year since they began their World Cup preparation last summer and that reality has probably reared its head at various junctures throughout both the provincial and international seasons.
No Six Nations title is easily obtained and a country that has won only 16 of them in over a century doesn’t have the right to demand style points, but it was impossible to avoid the sense that Ireland fell over the line in their defence of the Grand Slam; they were electrifying in Marseille and by the time Scotland came to Dublin, it felt like they were running on emergency power.
After each of the provinces’ ultimately disappointing campaigns, Ireland’s touring players both need and deserve the chance to unplug from the mains.
Today feels like that hard stop, not only because it’s the last game of an interminable season but because it it will mark the end of the very journey to which Farrell alluded in the spring.
It was always his plan to frame it in such a way; to treat 2024 almost like an additional year in the previous World Cup cycle before spending three years building towards Australia.
There are several reasons as to why he took this approach, chief among them being that tours of South Africa are significant entries in a country’s rugby history, and this might be Ireland’s last ever visit of its kind to the Rainbow Nation.
Tests away to the Springboks are also not typically a fruitful space in which to experiment with young players, whose confidence at international level could be set back a couple of years on a particularly difficult evening in Pretoria or Durban.
Equally, the second half of 2024 was always going to make for a natural break in Ireland’s development: Andrew Goodman, already shadowing Mike Catt on this tour, will soon replace the former England international as backs coach. Farrell himself will temporarily step away from his role to begin his Lions duties after the November tests. And in between, Simon Easterby will steer an Emerging Ireland tour back to South Africa on which he’ll hope to aid the progression of at least a handful of players who’ll play a role on the journey towards 2027.
This evening’s second test at Kings Park Stadium may prove the final stop on the line for one or two legends of Irish rugby. Cian Healy’s powers are waning and, as tempted as Farrell will be to give him the three more caps he requires to overtake Brian O’Driscoll’s all-time national record, developing depth at loosehead should be a more pressing concern.
Increasingly, too, it seems likely that Peter O’Mahony was named Ireland captain for this World Cup-plus-one year alone, a deserved honour that will forever precede his name but one which will soon be passed to a longer-term successor.
Farrell was left furious not only with Ireland’s sloppy errors at Loftus but by their failure to stand up for each other in response to South African aggression, both in gameplay and in between it.
They needed no further kick up the hoop than being force-fed some excruciating moments from last Saturday, but it’s almost guaranteed that Ireland will bring a kind of pig-headed belligerence to Durban in the suspicion that it will be the last time some of them share a pitch with each other.
A new journey will begin in the autumn, but this one still has 80 minutes left to run.
