LONG READ Did the best of Ireland leave with Johnny Sexton and Stuart Lancaster?

Rieko Ioane might not agree, but Johnny Sexton was a generational talent for Leinster, Ireland and the British and Irish Lions. Without Sexton, the renaissance of Ireland as a rugby nation would still be a pipe dream. Without the Leinster pivot, the Lions tour victories in 2013 [Australia] and drawn series in 2017 [New Zealand] would probably never have happened.

The echo of that success is disappearing too quickly for comfort from the current Ireland set-up, despite their status as reigning Six Nations champions. And it is not just Sexton, it is the absence of ex-Leinster senior coach Stuart Lancaster – now plying his trade with Racing 92 in the Top 14 – which is applying the handbrake.

The magic triangle of director of rugby Leo Cullen, Lancaster and Sexton was the IP engine which has been driving Irish rugby since 2016. Lancaster developed the world-leading attack systems which Sexton implemented on the field, and those patterns were good enough to overcome New Zealand on their own patch for the first time in history back in 2022.

The link between the two men was established before Lancaster was ever offered the job in Dublin. Lancaster remembers receiving a brief text from a man he didn’t know, coming out of the mid-blue Leinster distance.

“It was only a two-line text message but it meant a lot,” Lancaster told Off the Ball podcast. “We’d never met, but to have someone I obviously respected so much as a player do that was definitely a big factor in me coming. He just said: ‘let me know what we need to do to get it over the line because we’d love you to come.’ That ticked the box for me, they wanted me to come.”

The relationship went from strength to strength. Not for the first time, Sexton’s intuition was proven right. With the Cumbrian very firmly in the coaching saddle after a thumping Champions Cup win over Montpellier in January 2017, he was moved to say:

“It is not by accident that you see everyone wanting to get the ball in their hands. Stuart Lancaster has come in and had a big influence on the style of rugby.

“This is the stuff we practice every day in training, the unstructured part of our game, it is being worked on every day.

“Stuart has had a great influence on us and the whole organisation, and [Leinster] is a great place to be again.”

Sixteen short months later, the Dublin province were celebrating a return to the elite society of the European rugby after earning a fourth Champions Cup star, and Leinster has been sitting at the top table ever since:

“What a special coach to come in and do what he’s done. [Stuart] did an unbelievable job with England. That gets overlooked [because of] one result; a result in the World Cup that could have gone either way against Wales.”

When that kind of visionary, long-standing relationship is finally broken, the ripples it sends out are far-reaching, they extend all the way to the opposite shore of the national game.

When Lancaster left for Paris and Sexton finally called time on his illustrious career, Ireland suffered. On the evidence of last weekend’s climactic encounter with New Zealand, it is struggling to scratch the residual seven-year itch left behind by the firm of Cullen, Sexton and Lancaster. The suspicion is growing that the best of Irish IP may already have quit the country.

How can that drop-off be quantified? Under the auspices of Cullen, Lancaster and Sexton, a Leinster-based Ireland outfit evolved into the best high-tempo, ball-control nation on planet rugby. Take a look at the following stats.

This is close to the Lancaster/Sexton ideal. The men in green dominated possession and hit their key performance targets at this year’s Six Nations: high ball-in-play time of almost 40 minutes – tick; Ireland controlling the ball for well over 20 minutes of it – tick; regularly setting 100+ rucks per game – tick. Ireland only lost six lineouts and gave up 12 pilfers from their own rucks in the entire competition.

Now let’s move on to the July series in South Africa and conjoin the two matches in the Republic with Ireland’s one loss at the Six Nations, a round four defeat by England at Twickenham.

When Ireland struggle to impose their own tactical grid on a game of rugby, a typical pattern begins to emerge: the ball-in-play time falls dramatically, by over six minutes per game, and it is Ireland’s time in possession of the ball which is being eaten up in the process. The number of rucks they set falls by an average of 26 per game and the lineout loses 11% of its effective traction as the primary set-piece starter.

If this triangle of games formed a pattern, it is one the All Blacks were able to duplicate, and even improve upon, on a dank Friday evening in Dublin.

Against New Zealand, the ball-in-play time took a further cut of a minute and a half, with Ireland’s portion down to a meagre 13 minutes of possession; the number of rucks built dropped to almost half of the customary Irish output at the Six Nations and the lineout fell by a further 10%.

These figures raise huge questions about the ability of this Ireland team to maintain and build its current sense of identity against opponents who know how to launch the right counter-measures. Can Ireland keep winning when the architect of their rhythm-based, quick-tempo attacking approach now works in another country, to be replaced at the main province by a South African World Cup winner whose coaching emphasis is diametrically opposed? Can they keep winning when the main on-field driver of his ideas has now retired from the game?

There is a sense Ireland is hovering over a dark and forbidding philosophical precipice, especially with head coach Andy Farrell on Lions furlough from the beginning of 2025. To their credit, the All Blacks formulated exactly the right game plan to exploit Irish uncertainties.

New Zealand won the battle in the grey areas of the game by fair means or foul, invading the spaces Ireland have become accustomed to believing were their own private preserve. The process began at the early lineouts, with Scott Barrett and co closing the one-metre gap which should have existed at every throw on Irish ball.

The technique is termed ‘creepage’. The defensive lineout forwards start in the correct positions and then begin creeping imperceptibly across the gap before the throw, until it has completely evaporated at the moment of delivery. In the first clip Barrett and Tupou Vaa’i are so far across the line the Irish receiver can only jump for the ball with the ‘wrong’ or outside arm. In the second instance, as soon as the thrower [number 2 Ronan Kelleher] takes a sidestep towards his own receivers the All Blacks follow him, with Barrett himself taking a step into the middle of the line well before Joe McCarthy can get airborne.

This activity also produced a big bonus in defence of the lineout drive, another Ireland red zone speciality.

The All Blacks defenders hit the mid-line of the lineout marginally ahead of their opponents and that is enough for Barrett to blow up Irish attempts to shift the ball around the open-side corner of the drive and effect another turnover.

Another version of ‘the Aviva squeeze’ occurred at the breakdown. As the stats imply, Ireland are not used to losing ball when they take it into rucks. Whereas the All Blacks were penalised mercilessly for taking out runners without the ball at Twickenham, in Dublin they turned it into a positive.

Potential runners are removed from the overall picture to thin out the three-man forward pod and subtract men from the cleanout. In the first example, Tyrel Lomax takes out Caelan Doris after he has made the tip-on pass to leave Doris late to the cleanout on Wallace Sititi; in the second clip, the effect is doubled with McCarthy taken out by Barrett after making the pass to Doris and James Ryan obstructed by Vaa’i en route to the cleanout on the other side.

The ’Aviva squeeze’ was also applied in another form when Ireland attempted to attack in shallow four-man diamonds of runners.’

In both cases, an edge defender [Mark Tele’a in the first clip, Jordie Barrett in the second] targets the first attacker outside the diamond, flooding his space and forcing a surrender of possession via either a fumble or a kick.

New Zealand played it canny, pressuring the elements which need to work for Ireland to function at the level to which they have become accustomed: lineout, breakdown, attacking shape and tempo. If there was a surprise, it was that the All Blacks did not win by more, such was their control of proceedings.

The game could prove to be a seminal crossroads in Ireland’s development. They have lost a significant part of their brains trust with the retirement of Sexton and the departure of Lancaster. The latter has been replaced at Leinster by a man with a very different vision of what the game of rugby can be in the form of Jacques Nienaber.

The question now, as Lancaster’s teachings dim into the mist of memory and many of Ireland’s key players enter the twilight of their careers, is ‘who and what does Ireland want to become?’ It is the most existential question of all.