Nobody thought it was a good thing, or that any good would ever come of it.
New Zealand beat Ireland and sometimes trampled all over Ireland and sometimes patted Ireland on the head, without ever regarding Ireland as a threat, or a team from the same peer group. They knew they were better than us. We agreed.
For a long time it didn’t matter. Ireland’s season and Ireland’s status were dictated by how we performed against our neighbours. Summer tours to the southern hemisphere were routinely punishing.
Hosting those nations in Dublin in November offered the opportunity for one-off wins, but Ireland went through the 1980s and 1990s without beating Australia or South Africa. Our average losing margin against New Zealand in those decades was 29 points.
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The interesting and telling period, though, is between 2000, when Brian O’Driscoll scored a hat-trick in Paris, and 2015, when Ireland won back-to-back Six Nations titles. The fortunes of Ireland as a Test nation were transformed in those 15 years and yet, in 14 matches against New Zealand, our average margin of defeat was 21 points.
In the span of O’Driscoll’s career, Ireland played the All-Blacks 14 times and he lined up in 13 of those games. In that period Ireland put themselves in a winning position on no more than four occasions. O’Driscoll, Paul O’Connell and Ronan O’Gara, three of the greatest Irish players of all-time, finished their careers without beating New Zealand in an Irish jersey.
“People talk about the gap between the northern and southern hemispheres,” wrote Paul O’Connell in his autobiography, eight years ago now. “But, to me, the real gap is between New Zealand and everybody else.”
That was the thing: New Zealand had the last word. Whatever empirical gains we made, however many times we beat England or France or Australia or South Africa, our performances against New Zealand set our limit. How good were we? They told us.
In Johnny Sexton’s terrific new autobiography he writes about his first exposure to the All Blacks in 2010. He was on the bench for a Test match in New Plymouth and was blown away by their fitness levels; Ireland trailed 38-0 shortly before half-time before being annihilated, 66-28.
When did the All Blacks lose their aura?
A few months later he started against them in Dublin and Ireland led 13-12 approaching the break.
“But then they brought the speed and relentlessness of their recycling game to another level,” writes Sexton, “until eventually they broke us. We staggered back to the dressingroom, and I threw up in the jacks. I had never experienced intensity like that before. I doubt Dan Carter was puking.
“This time we lost 18-38 but didn’t feel too bad about ourselves. That’s just a reflection of where were at in 2010, and where they were at.”
Remember the context, though: a year earlier, Ireland had won the Grand Slam. Munster and Leinster had won successive Heineken Cups in 2008 and 2009. Fifteen Irish players were selected to tour with the Lions in 2009. And yet, in 2010, we couldn’t live with the All-Blacks.
Two years later Ireland went to New Zealand for a gruelling three-Test series. In the second match the teams were level in the last 10 minutes and though New Zealand had a player in the sin bin, they still won the game with a Carter drop goal in the final 27 seconds.
“For the next six days the New Zealand media take us seriously for a change,” writes O’Driscoll in his autobiography. “Fans on the street come over all friendly. ‘We really wanted you guys to win.’ ‘No, you didn’t – don’t patronise us.’”
In the third Test, New Zealand beat Ireland 60-0.
“That was fun out there today,” said their captain, Richie McCaw. “It’s the final ignominy,” writes O’Driscoll. “Even when you’re beaten you want them to walk off physically spent, feeling like they’ve earned it.”
But that was the problem: for all the thrashings and humiliations over the years, nobody drew a line in the sand and said: this is the final ignominy. Never again.
After he suffered a meltdown with his kicking on the 2002 tour to New Zealand, O’Gara engaged with a sports psychologist for the first time and over the years there must have been other individuals who emerged from the rubble of a beating by the All-Blacks, resolved in their minds to get better at something.
But, collectively, what did all those defeats amount to? One of the most thread-worn cliches in sport is that you learn more from a defeat than a victory. What were we learning?
For O’Connell, O’Driscoll, and others, their last chance against the All-Blacks came in November 2013, at the very beginning of Joe Schmidt’s time as coach. In the last play New Zealand tied the scores with a try in the corner and won the game with a touchline conversion. It is largely forgotten now that Ireland failed to score in the second half.
Late in the match, when Ireland still led by five points, Sexton missed a penalty to make it a two-score game. Just like O’Gara in 2002, he wasn’t prepared to sweep it under the carpet. He confronted all the reasons why he missed and went in search of effective futureproofing.
On a parallel track, Schmidt did the same thing. In a fascinating passage in Sexton’s book, he walks through the famous drop goal in Paris in 2018 that ignited another Grand Slam. With the game on the line, and the clocking spilling into the red, Ireland kept the ball for more than 40 phases.
“We have prepared for this with Joe,” he writes. “We have visualised extended periods of defence and attack. Our reference point is the All Blacks game of 2013. We’d have won that day if we’d been able to keep the ball efficiently and legally through multiple phases.
“[In training] Joe set four minutes of full-on, interrupted effort as our target – ‘killer defence’ or ‘killer attack’ were the drills he dragged us through.”
We were slow learners. New Zealand never tired of schooling us. Everything is different now. They forced us to change our minds. Be more like them.
Maybe we should be grateful.
