Should change their approach and focus on Japan 2019?

JulianSNZ

Yes. Ireland are 6 nations champions. But what does that really mean in the context of the recent rugby world cup, where the 6 nations was made to look like "The Europa League of Rugby", A second tier competition.

I think this world cup as devalued the significance of future 6 Nation championships,
where winning only gives you a right to claim 5th place in world. The gap between us and The Rugby Championship is more evident than ever.

So should Ireland change their approach to the game in preparation for Japan 2019. Even at the cost of s few lean years in the 6 Nations. Should we sacrifice that for a fighting chance at World Cup glory.

aimee1

JulianSNZ wrote: »

Yes. Ireland are 6 nations champions. But what does that really mean in the context of the recent rugby world cup, where the 6 nations was made to look like "The Europa League of Rugby", A second tier competition.

I think this world cup as devalued the significance of future 6 Nation championships,
where winning only gives you a right to claim 5th place in world. The gap between us and The Rugby Championship is more evident than ever.

So should Ireland change their approach to the game in preparation for Japan 2019. Even at the cost of s few lean years in the 6 Nations. Should we sacrifice that for a fighting chance at World Cup glory.

The 6n is a cash cow for the IRFU which goes a long way towards funding the Provinces/national side. I dont think we can afford to plan for 3-4 poor years in the 6n in order to try and win a QF in 2019. Otherwise we cut players salaries and our best players go to england/france?

The 6n titles do mean something, I dont think NZ see the RC as a nothing tournament. On the back of two 6n titles and a strong November 2014 Ireland were ranked 2nd earlier this year. So we are not competing for 5th place when it comes to WC seedings. A poor 2016 for Ireland could see us in a group with England and NZ in 2019.

errlloyd

Think about the question you just asked OP. Effectively it is this "Should we aim to be better at rugby in 4 years"

People keep talking about doing well in the wc and 6n as if they're mutually exclusive. As if they're different sports. Like "should we give up rugby and start playing quiditch because that is what we need to do, to be the best in the world".

Its utter horse****. If there is a dominant style of rugby which gave the RC teams an edge this year we should pursue that in the long term because we will win 6n and do better in world cups. It's not one or the other, it's beneficial for both.

In the short term would I accept a couple of third place finishes in the 6 Nations while we built a better style, yeah I probably would. Do I think it's as simple as "let the boys throw the ball around for 5 games each spring and in 4 years we will be beating the all blacks".

Argentina have spent a number of years doing that, and they played all 3 other RC, and were well beaten by full time.

LuckyLloyd

And their reward was a WC SF and a huge party after they smashed us to pieces in the QF

errlloyd

If we had Argentina's world cup we would still be disappointed.

They played 7 matches, 3 were against Minnows they won those, 3 were against RC teams they lost those, and one was against an incredibly depleted opposition, which they won.

sydthebeat

no

CMOTDibbler

JulianSNZ wrote: »

Yes. Ireland are 6 nations champions. But what does that really mean in the context of the recent rugby world cup, where the 6 nations was made to look like "The Europa League of Rugby", A second tier competition.

I think this world cup as devalued the significance of future 6 Nation championships,
where winning only gives you a right to claim 5th place in world. The gap between us and The Rugby Championship is more evident than ever.

So should Ireland change their approach to the game in preparation for Japan 2019. Even at the cost of s few lean years in the 6 Nations. Should we sacrifice that for a fighting chance at World Cup glory.

And if whatever it was we did that saw us not doing so well in the "Europa League of Rugby" for three years didn't work and we ended up out after the quarter finals, what then?

Something people don't seem to understand about the world cup is that it's cup rugby. It's almost a cliché, but cup rugby is unpredictable and requires a fair degree of luck to progress.

Luck of the draw, luck of the fixtures calendar, luck of what comes out of the other pools and in what position, luck with injuries (both your own and your opposition) and even luck with the weather conditions. This year we thought we were lucky with the draw in that it ramped up the difficulty with each match. In fact it turned out the other way, in that we got no opportunity to rest front line players before the QF. If we had played France first or second, the chances are that we'd have had Sexton available for the QF at the very least. But that's the luck of the draw.

Don't get me wrong, how good you are as a team and a squad is most of the battle, but in tight games and tight pools, sometimes luck can get you across the line or turn everything against you. The 6N is a tough competition too. Lots of turning up of noses at it at the moment, but the reality is that each match is a must win and the fixture list is tough with a mix of home and away matches.

Next year we have the two toughest away matches in England and France. We're in a bit of luck in that both of them will be breaking in new coaching teams and probably new players as well. But Wales will also be a tough proposition even if we will be playing them at home.

wp_rathead

errlloyd wrote: »

If we had Argentina's world cup we would still be disappointed.

They played 7 matches, 3 were against Minnows they won those, 3 were against RC teams they lost those, and one was against an incredibly depleted opposition, which they won.

Ah now, no we wouldn't

sydthebeat

JulianSNZ wrote: »

So should Ireland change their approach to the game in preparation for Japan 2019. Even at the cost of s few lean years in the 6 Nations. Should we sacrifice that for a fighting chance at World Cup glory.

what makes you think ireland dont have a 4 year plan to the next RWC?
or didnt have a 4 year plan since the last one?... a plan which allowed for 2 6N victories along the way.

at the end of the day we dont have the player pool, club set up and basic intrinsic systems that they have in SANZAR.

a realistic goal for us in a RWC is a semi final place.

so should we sacrific silver wear in our annual competition in order to play in a 3rd / 4th play off game in order to have a 'successful' RWC ?

Nope, every day of the week.....

Riskymove

wp_rathead wrote: »

Ah now, no we wouldn't

yes, we would.....

the equivalent RWC for Ireland would be

lose to France, Beat Canada, Romania and Italy

Beat Argentina in QF

lose badly to Australia in SF

Lose badly to SA in Bronze final


why would you be happy with that?

The Lost Sheep

Riskymove wrote: »

yes, we would.....

the equivalent RWC for Ireland would be

lose to France, Beat Canada, Romania and Italy

Beat Argentina in QF

lose badly to Australia in SF

Lose badly to SA in Bronze final

why would you be happy with that?

In light of all our previous f*** ups at world cups I would be happy as we would at least have got to a semi final for a first time. Yes disappointed at messing up beyond the quarters but still happy we went further than before

errlloyd

The Lost Sheep wrote: »

In light of all our previous f*** ups at world cups I would be happy as we would at least have got to a semi final for a first time. Yes disappointed at messing up beyond the quarters but still happy we went further than before

I really don't think we would TLS. A box would have been checked and that would have been nice, but imagine we played Argentina, but Creevy, JMFL, JMH, Sanchez and Bosch (suspended), then Imhoff goes off after about 5 minutes. We beat them (for the 6th time in a row as would have been the case), and go into a semi final just to get absolutely thumped.

But, we, the rugby fans of Ireland would be pissed off. What would we have demonstrated at the world cup? That on our day we can beat Argentina but we're still not as good as France or the Big 3?

The commentary before the match would have been Ireland can win the world cup, the commentary after would have been "the overhyped Irish team were able to do nothing more than beat minnows, and overcome a depleted Argentina team. They've beaten Argentina 6 times in a row. Argentina for all their promise have still only won two games in their entire rugby championship history, and have a lot yet to learn about being a top tier nation"


Right now you think to yourself "yeah I'd take a win against Argentina, the rugby world would respect that", but that's only because they beat us. Beating us was their world cup. They basically didn't do anything else.



I'm not trying to belittle Argentina here. However I do think if Ireland want to prove themselves we have to do more than aim to emulate what Argentina did. There is no point being the worst team at playing good rugby in the world. That style of rugby dominated this world cup, turgid rugby dominated the last 3, there is no knowing what will win next time out.

The Lost Sheep

errlloyd wrote: »

I really don't think we would TLS. A box would have been checked and that would have been nice, but imagine we played Argentina, but Creevy, JMFL, JMH, Sanchez and Bosch (suspended), then Imhoff goes off after about 5 minutes. We beat them (for the 6th time in a row as would have been the case), and go into a semi final just to get absolutely thumped.

But, we, the rugby fans of Ireland would be pissed off. What would we have demonstrated at the world cup? That on our day we can beat Argentina but we're still not as good as France or the Big 3?

The commentary before the match would have been Ireland can win the world cup, the commentary after would have been "the overhyped Irish team were able to do nothing more than beat minnows, and overcome a depleted Argentina team. They've beaten Argentina 6 times in a row. Argentina for all their promise have still only won two games in their entire rugby championship history, and have a lot yet to learn about being a top tier nation"

Right now you think to yourself "yeah I'd take a win against Argentina, the rugby world would respect that", but that's only because they beat us. Beating us was their world cup. They basically didn't do anything else.

I'm not trying to belittle Argentina here. However I do think if Ireland want to prove themselves we have to do more than aim to emulate what Argentina did. There is no point being the worst team at playing good rugby in the world. That style of rugby dominated this world cup, turgid rugby dominated the last 3, there is no knowing what will win next time out.

Of course that's natural to expect more but we never have reached a semi final and while we've made quarters in 6 of 8 world cups in how many competitions have we genuinely looked like making the semis? Making the semi finals is an achievement. I don't think we can dismiss actually winning a knock out world cup match until we actually do that. I wouldn't accept it for those reasons - I don't think at all the rugby world would respect that. We certainly can and should look to emulate what Argentina have done. They've contributed significantly more to world cups than we ever have. Id rather be the worst team at playing good rugby in the world than one of a group of nations behind that team playing **** rugby

captbarnacles

JulianSNZ wrote: »

Yes. Ireland are 6 nations champions. But what does that really mean in the context of the recent rugby world cup, where the 6 nations was made to look like "The Europa League of Rugby", A second tier competition.

I think this world cup as devalued the significance of future 6 Nation championships,
where winning only gives you a right to claim 5th place in world. The gap between us and The Rugby Championship is more evident than ever.

So should Ireland change their approach to the game in preparation for Japan 2019. Even at the cost of s few lean years in the 6 Nations. Should we sacrifice that for a fighting chance at World Cup glory.

No. The gap between NZ and the rest is more evident than ever. The rest of the tier one nations can all beat each other on the day.

Riskymove

The Lost Sheep wrote: »

In light of all our previous f*** ups at world cups I would be happy as we would at least have got to a semi final for a first time. Yes disappointed at messing up beyond the quarters but still happy we went further than before

actually looking at it again if we had the group results that Argentina did, then we'd have played All Blacks in QF so unlikely a SF

padser

The Lost Sheep wrote: »

Making the semi finals is an achievement. I don't think we can dismiss actually winning a knock out world cup match until we actually do that

Really? Is it an achievement just because we have never done it?

In my mind there were two types of people before the World Cup started who were saying "I really hope Ireland make a semi final". Those who were saying it because it's an achievement in itself and those who were saying it because it would leave us in with a shout of going further.

The reality is that Ireland are reasonably close to England, France, Australia, South Africa and Argentina in terms of ability. 3 of the 4 semi final slots were "up for grabs" for us with maybe 6 realistic contenders for them.

Within that context, I don't understand those who view a semi final as an achievement in itself and I didn't pre RWC either.

Maybe, as you say, it's just because we have never done it

The Lost Sheep

padser wrote: »

Really? Is it an achievement just because we have never done it?

In my mind there were two types of people before the World Cup started who were saying "I really hope Ireland make a semi final". Those who were saying it because it's an achievement in itself and those who were saying it because it would leave us in with a shout of going further.

The reality is that Ireland are reasonably close to England, France, Australia, South Africa and Argentina in terms of ability. 3 of the 4 semi final slots were "up for grabs" for us with maybe 6 realistic contenders for them.

Within that context, I don't understand those who view a semi final as an achievement in itself and I didn't pre RWC either.

Maybe, as you say, it's just because we have never done it

It is. Its better than anything achieved before so is an achievement in that case.

clear thinking

Riskymove wrote: »

yes, we would.....

the equivalent RWC for Ireland would be

lose to France, Beat Canada, Romania and Italy

Beat Argentina in QF

lose badly to Australia in SF

Lose badly to SA in Bronze final


why would you be happy with that?

Presumably the aim when entering the competition is to win.

I'd question why the French game was to focus for six months. Most of the noise around this Irish team, including players and coaches was about getting to the french game, so doing the above would have been a better result.

If you use an american football analogy, divisional winners lift off by playing back-ups in late season games as they are already in the playoffs. We should have done the same.

Their focus is on getting to the playoff tournament. We had no focus on this as the french game was the be-all.

Sacrificing the french game to the duds would have given the starters a two week rest before a QF, and a chance to get to a SF. Yes, possibly against NZ, but either you are in it to win or not.

Of course, the fixtures next time may not allow this option.

Riskymove

clear thinking wrote: »

the duds

jaysus

Podge_irl

This is ridiculous. Please point out a single successful World Cup team who ever played something apart from essentially their first choice team against the highest ranked group opponent.

sydthebeat

so given the choice of playing the all blacks
unbeaten in all but 4 game since the last time they won the world cup (and the eventual winners thus becoming the first team ever to retain the WWE)

or argentina,
a team who have won 2 of their last 21 rugby championship games, who have a win ratio of 43% under their current coach, whom ireland beat twice in teh last 2 times they played...

some posters actually believe that its would have been somehow logical to throw the france game to face the ABs.....
not in the deepest depths of narnian furniture would that make sense.

clear thinking

sydthebeat wrote: »

so given the choice of playing the all blacks
unbeaten in all but 4 game since the last time they won the world cup (and the eventual winners thus becoming the first team ever to retain the WWE)

or argentina,
a team who have won 2 of their last 21 rugby championship games, who have a win ratio of 43% under their current coach, whom ireland beat twice in teh last 2 times they played...

some posters actually believe that its would have been somehow logical to throw the france game to face the ABs.....
not in the deepest depths of narnian furniture would that make sense.

So you go to the world cup hoping to avoid New Zealand? If so, you are not in it to win it, what's the point of going to the tournament? We ran NZ to within a couple of points not a year earlier. QF exits are natural if that is the attitude.

New Zealand had 6/31 players play all their games, of those a number were as replacements. If it's good enough for them.

The Golden Miller

I don't think Ireland were half as good as they were hyped up to be. Our media seems to be like the English media in regards their football team. Super high expectations for an average team. We won two 6 nations, yet who did we beat? A Wales team in transition, a struggling English team and an atrocious France team (the worst French side I've seen in 2 decades). Winning by default really, more down to the regression of the others as opposed to progression. Where does that leave us? Over the long haul we can really only hope to be the 4th best in the 6 nations due to the small playing population compared to England, France and Wales. And despite being average this was still probably our best chance of doing something in the world cup. It will be about another 3 or 4 world cups before we have a realistic chance of going far again. For traditionally weak teams, you gotta take your chance when you have a half decent team. We blew ours. France will be back by 2019, as will England and Wales will always be there or there abouts

kuang1

The future's bright.

But not green.

Gotcha.

(And this feckin glass of mine is forever half-empty...dunno what it is about it but it's never full...bastarding thing)

The Lost Sheep

clear thinking wrote: »

So you go to the world cup hoping to avoid New Zealand? If so, you are not in it to win it, what's the point of going to the tournament? We ran NZ to within a couple of points not a year earlier. QF exits are natural if that is the attitude.

New Zealand had 6/31 players play all their games, of those a number were as replacements. If it's good enough for them.

We cant compare our depth to NZs though. We would need a complete overhaul to get depth like that. NZ had 6 of 31 play all games we cant....

The Golden Miller wrote: »

I don't think Ireland were half as good as they were hyped up to be. Our media seems to be like the English media in regards their football team. Super high expectations for an average team. We won two 6 nations, yet who did we beat? A Wales team in transition, a struggling English team and an atrocious France team (the worst French side I've seen in 2 decades). Winning by default really, more down to the regression of the others as opposed to progression. Where does that leave us? Over the long haul we can really only hope to be the 4th best in the 6 nations due to the small playing population compared to England, France and Wales. And despite being average this was still probably our best chance of doing something in the world cup. It will be about another 3 or 4 world cups before we have a realistic chance of going far again. For traditionally weak teams, you gotta take your chance when you have a half decent team. We blew ours. France will be back by 2019, as will England and Wales will always be there or there abouts

I don't think our media is like that. Its poor and are we really "average"? Its ridiculous to say we won by "default". Our playing population isn't too small compared to Wales and we can do well even with the resources in England, France

sydthebeat

clear thinking wrote: »

sydthebeat wrote: »

so given the choice of playing the all blacks
unbeaten in all but 4 game since the last time they won the world cup (and the eventual winners thus becoming the first team ever to retain the WWE)

or argentina,
a team who have won 2 of their last 21 rugby championship games, who have a win ratio of 43% under their current coach, whom ireland beat twice in teh last 2 times they played...

some posters actually believe that its would have been somehow logical to throw the france game to face the ABs.....
not in the deepest depths of narnian furniture would that make sense.

So you go to the world cup hoping to avoid New Zealand? If so, you are not in it to win it, what's the point of going to the tournament? We ran NZ to within a couple of points not a year earlier. QF exits are natural if that is the attitude.

New Zealand had 6/31 players play all their games, of those a number were as replacements. If it's good enough for them.

?? The quarter final was always going to give us Argentina or New Zealand.

Are you honestly arguing that we would have been better off playing the all blacks?
Seriously..... ??

clear thinking

The Lost Sheep wrote: »

We cant compare our depth to NZs though. We would need a complete overhaul to get depth like that. NZ had 6 of 31 play all games we cant....

We don't need to compare depth, we could have afforded to play a weak team when already qualified from the group.

sydthebeat wrote: »

?? The quarter final was always going to give us Argentina or New Zealand.

Are you honestly arguing that we would have been better off playing the all blacks?
Seriously..... ??

What do you mean by better off? If you mean going into the play off tournament with fresh starters off the back of two weeks rest against NZ then absolutely. Ultimately you would have to play them at some stage in the play off.

Remember too that france were so bad our second string would have had a great chance of beating them anyway, and we would have had a fresher 1st team going into the last 3 games. This is common practice in american football, it's not rocket science.

The core point I'm making though is the terrible mentality of targeting winning the group, rather than winning the tournament.

Podge_irl

clear thinking wrote: »

New Zealand had 6/31 players play all their games, of those a number were as replacements. If it's good enough for them.

They also started 14/15 players in both the main group game and the final.

You don't set out to do as well as you can in the world cup but deliberately throwing a game. It's just asinine thinking and a completely stupid idea.

Podge_irl

clear thinking wrote: »

The core point I'm making though is the terrible mentality of targeting winning the group, rather than winning the tournament.

Every single team who has won the tournament has won their group.

You "target" to win every game.

Podge_irl

And you focus on 2019 by getting better across the board. That means better integration between the national and provincial teams maybe, it might mean better routes for players to get from academy->provincial->international. Maybe it means better skills coaching at underage levels (though that will take longer to come to fruition).

Everything you do to better prepare for the 2019 world cup will help in the 6N and in general.

clear thinking

Podge_irl wrote: »

Every single team who has won the tournament has won their group.

You "target" to win every game.

Yeah, and if you want to give a team with poor depth, as stated by other posters here and not just me, the target of winning the tournament, the best way to do it is to play the second string against France. Of course you tell them to win the game.

But whatever result we would have had a starting 15 in the playoff stage fitter and with less suspensions than we did end up with.

Podge_irl

clear thinking wrote: »

Yeah, and if you want to give a team with poor depth, as stated by other posters here and not just me, the target of winning the tournament, the best way to do it is to play the second string against France. Of course you tell them to win the game.

But whatever result we would have had a starting 15 in the playoff stage fitter and with less suspensions than we did end up with.

Injuries and suspensions can happen in any game. Our depth is not stellar, but it just so happened most of the injuries/suspensions were exactly where we could not afford them. These things happen. NZ played basically their entire first choice backline against Tonga, having qualified.

The problem against Argentina wasn't "tiredness" anyway. Could we have done without the injuries? Sure, but that is frankly absurd levels of hindsight there - it was an incredibly unfortunate and unusual set of circumstances.

Resting our first choice players in the French game will always remain a completely stupid idea.

clear thinking

I can understand you might want to keep momentum and so on, but the way we approached the tournament obviously didn't work. Critical review should be applied to what happened and comparisons should be made with how other teams in other sports maximise performance in playoffs and we should be applying lessons already learned.

Many teams in other elite sports win championships losing along the way, with the exception of the knock out phase. So saying winning the group is necessary is spurious, 4 teams in RWC won their groups, 3/4 of them subsequently lost. In football only 6 World cup winners won all their games.

You can call the idea stupid all you want, but we had a head coach quoted saying he wanted to avoid NZ, to me that is defeatist from the outset. It also say a lot about the coaches thoughts on his 16 spare players if he felt that some or all were not an option against France.

I have seen no critical analysis of the coaching decisons, no review or post mortem by independent analysts or in the media (this is about the only decent cut at the questions to ask http://www.the42.ie/ireland-rugby-world-cup-review-schmidt-2401464-Oct2015/ ) and the IRFU's own review is no seeking input from external sources and will not be made public.

Podge_irl

clear thinking wrote: »

I can understand you might want to keep momentum and so on, but the way we approached the tournament obviously didn't work. Critical review should be applied to what happened and comparisons should be made with how other teams in other sports maximise performance in playoffs and we should be applying lessons already learned.

Sure, critical thinking is important. But why not equally (or more importantly) make comparisons to what successful teams in the same sport do and realise none of them do what you are advocating.

clear thinking wrote: »

You can call the idea stupid all you want, but we had a head coach quoted saying he wanted to avoid NZ, to me that is defeatist from the outset. It also say a lot about the coaches thoughts on his 16 spare players if he felt that some or all were not an option against France.

To me its just sensible. Why on earth would you not want to play an eminently beatable team rather than the undisputed best team in the world who you've never beaten.

Besides, had NZ somehow managed to come second in their group, I guarantee you Ireland would not have gone into that France game trying to lose. One of the "rewards" for winning the group was avoiding NZ, but the goal was winning the group.

That was our best result against France since 1975 ffs. The matches have historically been very, very close. Putting out a second team would have been the height of arrogance.

And ultimately, I would like to know what difference you think going into a NZ QF with a slightly more rested team would have made? You are acting is if that is obviously the better option and I don't even agree with that premise.

We lost a rugby match - it happens. The biggest problem we had was leaving too much space outside and defending too narrow - a problem massively exacerbated by missing Payne, Sexton and O'Brien. It's just one of those things - wildly disappoining of course but so be it. I, at least, do not think its comparable to the previous few world cups which had more obvious structural failings.

The Golden Miller

The Lost Sheep wrote: »

We cant compare our depth to NZs though. We would need a complete overhaul to get depth like that. NZ had 6 of 31 play all games we cant....

I don't think our media is like that. Its poor and are we really "average"? Its ridiculous to say we won by "default". Our playing population isn't too small compared to Wales and we can do well even with the resources in England, France

Ah seriously. It's a national sport in Wales effectively, it's played in pockets here. In the mid to long term they will always win far more 6 nations than us, as will England and France. Traditionally weak teams like ourselves need to strike when they have a good squad together as they don't have the consistency of quality players coming through like Australia, Wales, England, France, New Zealand and South Africa. It's no coincidence we are normally ranked 7th in the world until recently. We'll be heading back there soon enough as every rugby fan knows but wouldn't admit to themselves

nice_guy80

Send more promising young players abroad to England, Wales and France and even Japan to develop

Some will develop, some won't.
Some will come back better players, some might never come back.
Hopefully some will return with skills and stuff they'd never have learned in Ireland
Too many players with not enough teams and chances for them here in Ireland