LONG READ Why Ireland are in the best possible position to pip the All Blacks in Paris

It is called ‘cohesion’ and ex-Wallabies tighthead prop Ben Darwin has made a business out of it. His firm is ‘Gain-Line Analytics’ and it offers a service which measures the level of understanding within sports organisations, and predicts success, or lack of it, on the quality of cohesion.

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As Darwin explained on the Aotearoa Rugby Pod just before the World Cup:

“We believe that there is a misunderstanding about how teams work. The driver of success is not individual skill, but the level of collective understanding within a team – whether that be interpersonal understanding, system understanding or role understanding.

“What we are saying is that the individual skill factor might make two or three percent difference, but Cohesion can make up to an 80 per cent differential. Nobody has ever won a World Cup without being in the top two or three [teams with cohesion].”

Darwin and his co-founder Simon Strachan have painstakingly built a Team-Work Index (TWI) which measures players’ understanding of their roles in a team, and the strength of the linkages between them augmented by coaching or administration. Repetition and consistency make those linkages stronger and grow the team.

The Crusaders in New Zealand and Leinster in Ireland are two excellent examples of cohesive rugby programs which have stood the test of time. “Strachan says that, pre-Covid, there was a study that showed [that] when a player debuted for the Crusaders, he had already played with eleven of his teammates. The naturally cohesive environment allows ‘debutants’ to excel in comfortable team structure with teammates they already know.”

It is the same in Ireland with the Dublin-based Leinster province, who regularly supply 11 or 12 players to the run-on national side. Darwin again:

“We looked at Ireland and what a change of combinations [personnel] would do. Only a couple of combinations could go wrong, because you have got guys [either] coming out of Leinster, or who have played together extensively. When things go awry – the ‘whitebait’ scenario … Some teams can change players in and out, and that is where I see Ireland having an advantage.”

The Crusaders are no longer quite as dominant an influence on All Blacks selection, or even coaching, as they once were. Probably there will not be more than four men from the franchise in the starting XV that New Zealand will field in next weeks’ quarter-final against – you guessed it – Ireland.

Does that grant the men from the Emerald Isle an advantage? And if it does, how would that advantage manifest itself? One of the most obvious tests of cohesion is a team’s ability to withstand injuries and maintain the same level of performance.

Ireland gave some strong clues as to why they are such a resourceful and cohesive bunch in the final round of Pool B play against Scotland.

Australia lost their skipper Will Skelton and their premier tighthead prop Taniela Tupou, and the Wallabies promptly fell apart completely in Pool C, first losing to Fiji before being routed unceremoniously by Wales. What will France look like without the presence of the best player in the world, Antoine Dupont? As a very long tournament progresses to the knockout stages, who will survive the attrition rate the best?

Ireland gave some strong clues as to why they are such a resourceful and cohesive bunch in the final round of Pool B play against Scotland. Andy Farrell’s charges had already put the game away before halftime, going into the sheds with a resounding 26-0 lead.

Ireland’s attacking cohesion is built on a rock-solid Leinster foundation. In the Six Nations competition at the beginning of the year, they enjoyed the highest proportion of minutes on attack (an average of 20.5 minutes per game), built the most rucks (109 per game) with the highest ratio of lightning-quick ball (65 per cent). If you are going to test defences with multi-phase attack, everyone needs to know their own roles to a tee, and be able to move into position more quickly and accurately than the defence.

The first example of Ireland’s cohesion arrived from the kick return to Scotland’s opening exit of the game:

After launching the kick up to halfway, the Scotland forwards are on one side, and the backs are on the other. Two tight forwards (hooker George Turner and second-rower Grant Gilchrist) are defending next to scrumhalf Ali Price on the short-side. Ireland would have recognised this as a weak set on defence, but they need to develop the target area further to prove it.

They run another phase out to the right, to widen the space and eliminate any help those defenders can receive from the backs on the far side of the ruck. At the end of the play, both Scotland centres have been absorbed in the breakdown, and that is the only encouragement Ireland needs to apply the coup de grâce:

Centre Garry Ringrose and both wings have regrouped quickly to the left, and Ringrose runs straight into the hole between Turner and Gilchrist to set up the score for James Lowe in the left corner. That is surgical cohesion in action, but you can only show its power if you have a deep understanding of your own systems and what you want to achieve out on the field.

The sequence was reminiscent of Ireland’s second try against the All Blacks in the decisive third Test at Wellington back in 2022:

Two straightforward phases out to the right from scrum split the Kiwi centres to either side and give the men in green the advantage when the play comes back to the opposite side, and crisp short passing between Johnny Sexton, Bundee Aki and Robbie Henshaw does the rest. As ex-All Blacks scrumhalf Justin Marshall noted in the television commentary: “Every single player knows where he has to be.” Marshall was absolutely right.

Towards the end of the first period versus the Scots, Ireland was able to demonstrate the second big upside of cohesion. With both wings retiring due to injury, Farrell was forced to introduce a new second five-eighth (Ulsterman Stuart McCloskey), move a natural No 12 (Aki) to centre, and field two emergency wings in Ringrose and scrum-half Jamison Gibson-Park. It mattered not one whit.

First Ireland scored a superbly-orchestrated try straight from lineout:

The long-hand version occurred at the beginning of the second half, with Gibson-Park now on the pitch for Lowe:

This is the basic situation Ireland wants to exploit. They have three potent attackers (Aki, Ringrose and dynamic hooker Dan Sheehan) aligned opposite the two Scottish halves, Price and Finn Russell. This will be a mismatch if Ireland can set up the attack accurately at the right moment:

Sheehan already has his hand up on the left touch-line, but the Irish are not afraid to bring Gibson-Park into play on the far right first, in order to make the opportunity on the opposite side entirely limpid, and crystal-clear:

When the time is right, Jamison Gibson-Park is playing exactly the same role that Mack Hansen would have been fulfilling off the right wing: working hard off the ball, following play all the way out to the left, making the extra man and delivering the money-ball to Sheehan, who has only Russell in front of him near the goal-line.

Even with all three replacement backs on the field, and three people playing out of position, the attacking shape is seamless and the roles are known and understood: “Every single player knows where he has to be.”

Will ‘cohesion’ win Ireland a William Webb Ellis trophy? If that were truly the case, the result would already be a foregone conclusion. But it isn’t, and cohesion isn’t the only factor at play. Since the arrival of Joe Schmidt and Jase Ryan on the New Zealand coaching staff, the All Blacks have been knitting together well, and developing plenty of understanding and momentum of their own.

The truth is that both Ireland and New Zealand have both improved since they last met in that historic 2022 Test series. The All Blacks won the 2023 Rugby Championship without dropping a game in a foreshortened competition, while Ireland improved from runners-up to Grand Slammers between 2022 and 2023, beating arch-rivals France along the way.

They are currently on a 17-match unbeaten run, and you need to go all the way back to the first Test at Eden Park on 2 July 2022 to find their last loss… to New Zealand. It tees up the quarter-final between the two nations very nicely indeed. New Zealand has the historical provenance, but Ireland is as tight nicker-elastic. If Andy Farrell’s men are to take the next step on their World Cup journey, who would they rather face? Where would they rather be?