Ireland Rugby
Damien McKenzie’s boot the difference as New Zealand ended Ireland’s Dublin run
Haka Response Watch!
Rieko Ioane leads his team in the pre-match challenge, Ireland take the traditional interlocked arms round the shoulders, standing in a line while staring approach.
Continue reading...The country boy from Lacken who is now a world-class No 8 on enjoying captaincy, a fascination with psychology and his penchant for hot yoga
It will be another six months before Andy Farrell finally has to choose his British & Irish Lions captain for the 2025 expedition to Australia. Plenty of time for the landscape to change and, theoretically, for one or two surprise contenders to emerge from the shrubbery. Until, that is, you sit down with the staggeringly impressive Caelan Doris and realise there is little need for Farrell to look anywhere else.
A bold prediction? Hardly. It is not rocket science that a world-class player with the universal respect of his peers, a university degree in psychology and a warm smile might just fit the bill. Ireland have produced some illustrious Lions captains in the pro era, from Brian O’Driscoll to Paul O’Connell and Peter O’Mahony, and another top-drawer candidate lurks quietly in the wings.
Continue reading...If you thought you knew the celebrated former Ireland fly-half, it’s time to look deeper – this is no leafy lane memoir
Perhaps the most tell-tale aspect of Johnny Sexton’s new autobiography is that it took seven years to stitch together. Seven years? Not since James Joyce took a similar timeframe to write Ulysses has there been such a slow-cooked Irish literary stew. And as Peter O’Reilly, Sexton’s excellent (and potentially long-suffering) ghostwriter, reveals in the final acknowledgments, there was little need for many supplementary interviews because of “Johnny’s exceptional memory for detail”. Combine those twin ingredients and a tasty dish is all but assured.
Because Johnny can remember everything and everyone. What his friends said and did, what his enemies were thinking (or, at least, what he thought they were thinking), how he felt at certain crucial moments. If it reads at times like a cold-eyed dispatch from an endless battle that is, for a good deal of his career, how it felt. “For so much of the time I was at war – with opponents, with rivals, sometimes with coaches, often with myself. For the most part … it felt like a fight.”
Continue reading...Ciarán Frawley coolly landed a last-gasp drop goal as Ireland weathered a second-half storm to pull off a stunning 25-24 victory in Durban and secure a 1-1 series draw against South Africa. Frawley stepped off the bench to split the posts in dramatic fashion with the final action of a thrilling encounter at Kings Park Stadium after a similar effort 10 minutes earlier.
Andy Farrell’s side had looked set to slip to an agonising defeat to the back-to-back world champions after Conor Murray’s try helped reward a ferocious first-half display with a 16-6 lead. The flawless fly-half Handré Pollard slotted eight penalties to turn the contest in the Springboks’ favour on the back of their 27-20 triumph last weekend in Pretoria.
Continue reading...The Springboks’ bench won a penalty try at the death to settle a thrilling contest between two true heavyweights
The players are making their way out to the field.
They pass under a sign that reads, “Altitude. 1 350m. It matters”.
Continue reading...The Ireland wing James Lowe went from hero to zero as the world champions, South Africa, underlined their status as Test rugby’s top-ranked nation with a gripping 27-20 win in Pretoria.
Lowe produced a sensational offload to set up a debut try for Jamie Osborne and thought he had brought Andy Farrell’s men level with a superb breakaway score in the second half.
Continue reading...Next month’s Test double-header on South African soil will write a new chapter in an increasingly rancorous struggle
No sooner had Ireland claimed a 13-8 win over South Africa in the Rugby World Cup last year – an epic tussle in a tournament littered with all-time encounters – a thumping rendition of the Cranberries’ Zombie rang out around Stade de France. The song’s connections with the Troubles, the IRA and Ireland’s struggle for peace was lost on most South African fans that sweaty Saturday night in Paris. Their primary reaction to Ireland’s adopted anthem was rage.
“What’s in your heeeeaad, in your heeeeeeeaaaaad!” It was hard for them not to feel this was meant as a jibe; that the Irish, who have never seen their players lift the sport’s most glittering trophy, who had never even seen them reach the semi-finals of a World Cup, were rubbing South African noses in their success. That their No 1-ranked team had wormed their way into the subconscious of every South African by relegating the Boks to a stepping stone on their march to glory. The face of Rassie Erasmus, South African rugby’s god-king, said it all. He was seething. What was a friendly rivalry had now become personal.
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Continue reading...Before entering business, O’Reilly played rugby for Ireland and the Lions and could have been ‘one of the world’s greats’
Tony O’Reilly has died aged 88 and this week’s business pages will pay tribute to a titan of the corporate world who struck commercial gold with Kerrygold and built a hill of beans with Heinz. It is a sign of a life remarkably well lived, then, that his name will also always have a place in the pantheon of Irish sporting heroes and prompt a wry smile whenever rugby union’s classic old-school anecdotes are retold.
As a player good enough to have been selected as the youngest Lion in history when chosen to tour South Africa as a teenager in 1955, O’Reilly might have reached even loftier heights in the game had his burgeoning business career not intervened at the age of 26. There was to be one last impromptu hurrah, however, when he was famously recalled seven years later to face England at Twickenham.
Continue reading...After a successful Six Nations Peter O’Mahony’s men will now face the sternest test of all against the world champions
It was not quite what the Irish were dreaming of after maximum points from the first three rounds, but back-to-back championships puts this Ireland team in a small elite of Six Nations champions. They become the sixth team to have managed the feat and, interestingly, only the third, after Wales in 2012-13 and England in 2016-2017, to follow up a grand slam with the title. It is as if teams really want to beat you when you are grand-slam champions.
Peter O’Mahony had the air of a satisfied man. Twelve years after his Ireland debut, this has been his first full campaign as captain. It was, perhaps harshly, pointed out to him that he had never won a thing in nigh on 15 years as a captain (of Munster and intermittently Ireland), and now he has won twice in 10 months (Munster won the United Rugby Championship in May).
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