The Trib (58 page)

From a job, albeit a summer one, where he would have, at times, toiled hard and not picked up a penny, he now enjoys a role where his post-World Cup net is completely bare and he still gets rewarded handsomely. If during those summers down in Youghal, O'Sullivan felt that Mother Nature was treating him a touch unfairly, then there's no doubt that the stars have re-aligned themselves in such a way as to make up for her unpredictability. Ridiculously so. The more you write about it, or read it, the more absurd it gets. The man who has led Ireland to their worst Rugby World Cup performance in the history of the competition is being rewarded for his many incompetencies over the past few months with a new four-year contract and a significant pay rise to boot. For those of us out there who possess some sense of natural justice – that good deeds should be rewarded and bad deeds punished – our moral compass has been completely skewed.

What makes this even worse is the stunning arrogance with which the coach and the IRFU have gone about their business over the past week. It all started minutes after another inadequate effort against Argentina at the Parc des Princes last Sunday. In a touchline interview, Sinéad Kissane, the TV3 reporter, asked Eddie O'Sullivan would he be reconsidering his position now that the World Cup was over, a wholly legitimate question that the vast majority of the rugby nation wanted an answer to. O'Sullivan feigned not to hear and when she asked it again he replied with the words, ‘No. Absolutely not. Absolutely not.'

Kissane then asked another question and O'Sullivan's voice was still audibly quivering with shock at what he had been asked thirty seconds previous. Did he not foresee the question coming? Or did he not think he should have been asked it? Clearly not, because as he bade farewell to Kissane with the nastiest of looks at the end of the interview, he walked over to IRFU media manager Karl Richardson and whispered something in his ear. Richardson then fixed his gaze on Kissane, motioned her towards him with his index finger and proceeded to verbally admonish her for a good ten seconds. We're still puzzled as to why.

How on earth either O'Sullivan or Richardson thought the question was either unexpected or inappropriate is anyone's guess. And the way in which Kissane was treated by O'Sullivan's withering look and Richardson's dressing down was unedifying to say the least.

To be fair, the behaviour was out of character for the normally affable Irish media manager but it might just be a sign of the you're-either-with-us-or-against-us mentality that seems to be pervading the IRFU right now.

The media circus rolled on. On Monday, Philip Browne, a highly paid chief executive, was wheeled out on RTÉ News to tell the nation that the IRFU were going to stick with O'Sullivan. Just like the press conference announcing the coach's four-year extension before the World Cup, Browne spoke little sense and appeared to entirely misjudge the mood of rugby supporters out there. He spoke of how ‘three bad matches' – we make it eight in a row now – hadn't changed what O'Sullivan had achieved over the past four to five years and that he didn't want a situation like in Wales, who were looking for their thirteenth coach in twenty years.

He's right on that count. Why on earth would the IRFU want to be like the Welsh, an international side whose stylish Grand Slam win in 2005 eclipses anything O'Sullivan has ever done with Ireland? No, he's right. It's better to go out of the World Cup with a whimper having scored just eight tries than to go out having played a full part in the game of this World Cup, or possibly any World Cup, having amassed twenty-three tries. No, no, we don't want to be like Wales.

That kind of talk makes us extremely worried about the upcoming review into Ireland's World Cup performance. As far as we understand it, and it's not that straight-forward, it will work a little something like this. All the different people in charge of the many elements of Team Ireland – rugby, medical, logistics, fitness, communications and so – will each write a report on their respective areas of responsibility and those files will be sent to Lansdowne Road for the relevant committees to peruse at their leisure. As we understand it, Eddie O'Sullivan will not have to stand in front of anybody and explain himself. He'll only have to appear in person and open his mouth if the people reading his particular report, the appointments committee as far as we know, need some more answers. We bet they won't need them. So to sum up, we're going to have O'Sullivan justifying himself on paper to three people – Neilly Jackson, Pat Whelan and Noel Murphy – who'll be willing to accept any kind of waffle to justify their own decision to award him a four-year contract extension. As far as interrogation goes, it won't exactly be Guantanamo Bay. It's going to be a complete whitewash.

And after that? Rumours have been going about the place these past few weeks that the rest of the Irish management team were unhappy with the fact that O'Sullivan looked after himself in the contract stakes and left the rest of his colleagues in limbo. Rumours? How could the rest of the management team be anything but unhappy at the contract situation?

It's funny that O'Sullivan has claimed the consistency of the past few years as his own achievement but the moment things go askew it's someone else's fault. For example, after the French game the coach blamed discipline on the pitch (the players' responsibility) and Ireland's creaky line-out (Niall O'Donovan's job) for the defeat.

Surely a strong character like O'Donovan, and others on the coaching staff, must be thinking of walking away from it all now. Not only have they not received any recognition from the union for what this regime is supposed to have achieved over the past few years, they're constantly dumped upon by their most senior colleague when things go wrong. However, it's only by thinking about the situation they're in that you understand why they haven't rocked the boat. If any of them resigned their posts, they'd be blacklisted by the IRFU and would struggle to get a job in any of the provincial set-ups. The whole system is farcical. It's like communist China out there.

Piss-off the authorities, the IRFU in this case, and you could be blacklisted and put under house arrest for the rest of your career.

Meanwhile, the big boss gets away scot free. Not once during, or after, this World Cup has O'Sullivan held his hands up and taken responsibility for anything. At Sunday's post-match press conference, the coach, still a little rattled by the surprise of being asked if he was going to reconsider his position, finally admitted that he felt his players might have been short of rugby going into the tournament.

It was the coach's eureka moment. Finally, after four weeks of attempting to put his finger on what was going on with his off-colour side, he came up with some sort of explanation, but he still didn't exactly claim it was his fault. There's been a stunning lack of accountability from the coach throughout the whole competition and while Brian O'Driscoll did the decent thing on Sunday and claimed that the players were responsible for everything that went wrong, the guy sitting beside him kept his mouth shut and allowed his captain's words to drift into the air without any company. Yet another example of poor man-management.

So what should be done? If they weren't so far up their own backsides, the IRFU would now be looking for a new head coach, one with southern hemisphere coaching experience if possible. As we mentioned last week, every team that has performed to any degree so far at this World Cup has employed a coaching team rich in cross-hemisphere coaching experience. It's only the unions who struggle to see past their own noses, the RFU and IRFU in particular, who believe that they simply have to appoint a native as national coach.

Again, we stress the fact that there's nothing wrong whatsoever with having an Irish coach of the Irish team but by the same logic, there's nothing wrong with having a foreign coach of our national side either. It's about picking the right man for the job and right now it appears as though our mentally weary players could do with the influence of somebody who's experienced rugby somewhere other than Ireland or Britain.

Instead of considering this kind of option, however, the IRFU seem intent on doing the best ostrich impersonation they can manage, and hope that by the time they spit the last of the sand from their mouths, everything will be okay.

In the meantime, the WRU will be headhunting the best available, or soon to be available, coach in the world to succeed Gareth Jenkins. Warren Gatland's name has been mentioned and it would appear from his comments this week that the former Irish and Wasps coach is up for the job. Jake White, another technically excellent coach, might also come into contention if he, as predicted, quits the Springboks after the World Cup. Nick Mallett might have been another contender only for the fact that Italy signed him up first.

What will be interesting to observe during the 2008 Six Nations is how the rapid-fire decision-makers out there, Wales and Italy, fare in comparison to Ireland. If O'Sullivan's side can't beat both of these sides at Croke Park, serious questions will have to be asked. In truth, if Ireland can't produce at least four out of five victories next spring, as he has done over the past two Six Nations campaigns, then the logical thing for the IRFU will be to hand him his cards.

Then again, no decision they make ever again can surprise us. Even if O'Sullivan catches nothing, he'll probably still be retained.

Clive Woodward's credibility as a coach is in serious doubt after the Lions' 38-19 defeat to New Zealand closes a disastrous tour.

10 July 2005

A
s the series trophy presentation took place in front of the Main Stand at Eden Park yesterday, Clive Woodward strolled around shaking hands with his defeated players. For a lot of them, it was probably for the first time and that's not an exaggeration. A number of squad members have been commenting in recent days about how little they've spoken to the Lions coach over the course of the past six weeks.

With the tour at an end and Woodward's credibility as a rugby coach in serious doubt, they're probably thanking their lucky stars that they haven't had their minds filled with the doublespeak and nonsense that routinely emerges from his mouth. There was yet more of it after the game when Woodward declared that his squad are ‘better people, better players' at the end of this six-week tour but perhaps the New Zealand inflection of his statement – they pronounce ‘e' as ‘i' in this part of the world – gives a more accurate reflection as to what state of mind the Lions travel home in today.

Because no matter how much the squad have enjoyed their stay in the land of the long white cloud, they can't be happy with the direction the test series has taken and yesterday's 38-19 defeat in Auckland can only have served to emphasise this point further.

There have been so many glaringly obvious tactical errors from Woodward over the past few weeks, the squad have surely lost whatever faith they ever had in their frontman.

The post-series statistics tell us everything we need to know about the gulf in tactical ambition and class between the two sides and, indeed, the two sets of coaching teams. If the three games are totted up in aggregate fashion, the All Blacks would have won 107-40, a tally that we know could have been a lot more had the heavens not opened up during the first test in Christchurch. It's a similar story with the try count after the three tests, the All Blacks scoring four times as many tries as their visitors, 12-3 the figure confirmed by the tallymen. ‘I'm not sure what the final try count was in this one; I've lost count,' said Graham Henry as he reminded the assembled media that his much-maligned Lions side of 2001 shared fourteen tries with Australia over the course of the test series.

So the All Blacks collected their Waterford Crystal trophy – the glass, not the horse – although the Lions supporters would have been forgiven for wondering whether the thoroughbreds in the New Zealand line-up had needed their urine looking at in the past few months. Take Tana Umaga for one. The captain has been immense all series, as a battering ram, as a tackler, as an evasive runner, as a leader – as everything you could ever desire from a rugby player.

Yesterday he scored two tries from close range and it was strange that when he spent time in the sin bin early in the game, his side actually appeared to get better, scoring tries through Conrad Smith and Ali Williams to swing the tide. And that was the story of the game really.

Beforehand, there was a lovely balance to the Lions side with five players from each of England, Ireland and Wales in the starting lineup, and the test team truly became the power of four when Gordon Bulloch took to the paddock with one minute of normal time on the clock. But while yesterday's side never let themselves down as individuals, the team effort was much less than the sum of its parts.

They appeared tired and disjointed as the game wore on but to their immense credit, they never folded to fully allow a youthful All Blacks side, in which debutant out-half Luke McAlister contributed magnificently, to truly run riot.