Joe Schmidt's reasoned argument about the virtues of players committing to the provinces rather than being enticed to foreign shores carried an added resonance when, half an hour after his departure from the Hurlingham club to Heathrow airport, the IRFU confirmed that Munster duo Keith Earls and Conor Murray had agreed three-year central contracts.
Schmidt broached the recent contractual tugs of war between Irish players and English suitors, without any recourse to the imminent communique from the union. He wasn't being obtuse; in fact, he held forth on a variety of topics in great detail, flecked with humour, in his first press conference since the World Cup.
On Monday Saracens' siren call had all but lured Earls to London; by Thursday afternoon Munster and Ireland had prevailed. The Ireland coach explained: "Look, when Keith's in camp we do chat about things and I think one of the players who's gone recently [Marty Moore] has genuine regret.
“The word ‘exodus’ has been bandied around in some of the media and by the very definition of the word it’s a mass movement of population, and I don’t really see that happening.
“We’re always trying to keep our players. They don’t become unavailable to us, but they become less accessible to us. Therefore, we’re always going to defer to the guys who are inside the country.
“I talk to players on an opportunity basis, on a playing for Ireland, on a longevity of their career, because they will get better looked-after in Ireland than most other players, because they will get well managed in between their Ireland commitments and their provincial commitments.
‘Follow their hearts’
“There are guys giving up good sums of money to stay where they are, to play for their country and play for their province, and I think it’s one of the fantastic things that is still slightly amateur about rugby that people still follow their hearts a little bit, not just their bank balance.”
Ireland are chasing a third consecutive Six Nations Championship title, an undertaking that Schmidt believes, while difficult, won't be compromised by any lingering disappointment from the World Cup.
"To be as candid as I can be, I think a top-half finish would be a good Six Nations for us. We start with Wales and France in a six-day turnaround and then go to England. That could put us in a very tough position.
“Our dream would be to do what no [Ireland]team has done before and we’re not going to give up the dream, but we’re also reasonably pragmatic and practical in what we try to deliver, and I think I would be unfair on the players if I said the only way to be successful is to win the Championship.”
To the suggestion that the Six Nations wasn’t a suitable environment to experiment with young players and that there would be limited scope to tweak the gameplan employed at the World Cup, Schmidt responded: “It’s funny, the game plan in the World Cup I thought served us really well and we still did get two tries against Argentina, and I could show you a bit of footage that one good decision gives us another one at least. That makes you competitive against a really good side.
“Are we that far away? We’ve beaten all the southern hemisphere sides in the last two years apart from the All Blacks. I don’t think we’re that far away and ironically we change our gameplan a little bit week to week, so we don’t do the same things.”
‘Challenging teams’
Schmidt spoke about a conversation he’d had with
Andy Farrell
about how difficult the latter found it as England’s defence coach (he becomes Ireland’s after the Six Nations) to try and shut down Ireland in attack. “If we are challenging teams to analyse us like that, that’s a strength because the more time they spend analysing us, the less time they’re going to be spending looking at how to disassemble us.
“Even coming out of the World Cup, per game we kicked exactly the same number of times as the All Blacks did. You have a look at the All Blacks’ last three games, how did they play against France? France only made two less offloads than the All Blacks did. How’d they play against South Africa? They suffocated them, they put the ball in behind them; they kicked a huge number of times.
“Then against the Wallabies, they changed it up again. They don’t play the same way and they’ve got fantastic players to play any way they want to on any given day depending on how they think they want to manipulate the opponent.
“I think it is about getting a balance in how you play and there’s a reality in that we’ve got five trainings before we play Wales. There’s a reality that you can’t reinvent the wheel; you can continually fine-tune it, but to reconstruct it is very, very difficult.”
