David Nucifora has said the IRFU would be “ecstatic” if Andy Farrell was to become the next Lions head coach in 2025. Farrell signed a two-year extension until the end of the 2024-25 season and the IRFU performance director said the union hoped to secure his assistant coaches for as long as possible too.
“It does tie in with a Lions year and we’d be ecstatic if Andy was the Lions coach, we think that that would be fantastic. If he gets offered that job and chooses to take it, we’d be fully supportive of him because for us that’s part of the growth of the game here. So, there are things that would be assessed along the way.
“We feel that we’ve got a world-class head coach, a really good coaching ticket that supports him and we’ll be working to try and secure them for as long as we can.”
‘The best coach’
Interest in hiring Farrell abroad, specifically by the RFU, had no sway in the decision. “We had the agreement with Andy before we went to New Zealand, it just wasn’t made public. That’s how confident we are that we’ve got the best coach.”
Nucifora was confident that the IRFU will retain Paul O’Connell, Mike Catt and Simon Easterby as well. “But I couldn’t guarantee you that at the moment. And if that didn’t happen, would I be worried about that? I would be disappointed but I wouldn’t be worried,” he added, citing there would always be interest from good people abroad because of the “really robust” Irish system.
As for his own position, Nucifora implied his successor might be in place around the summer of 2024, by which stage he’ll be 10 years in the job. He also said that agreement was near completion for a young Irish coach to work in Super Rugby.
In giving his annual state of the nation briefing to the Irish media, Nucifora’s opening 40-minute plus address accentuated all the positive advances in the men’s game. He cited Test level, Ireland A, Emerging Ireland, under-age teams, provinces and academies while extolling the people employed in the IRFU for making the pathway work and also outlining plans for the growth of the women’s game.
Thinking differently
That apart, his biggest apparent concern is finding more game time for the young playing pool coming through the system.
“Our next task for the future is to work out how we house all the good players that have been created in the model. We have to think differently. Unless we want to sit back and lose our players elsewhere because other countries can come and pick off our best young players, we have to give them opportunity to play.
“Whether that is Emerging Ireland, or Ireland A, or whether it is something else it has to be looked at because, beyond that Under-20 group and with that professional contracted group and with the way that the URC [United Rugby Championship] is at the moment, what it allows and doesn’t allow us to do, we have to be creative.”
Nucifora admitted that there had been friction with the provinces over the recent Emerging Ireland tour being foisted upon them since the summer tour to New Zealand. He said: “The best high-performance model has friction. If you don’t have friction, then you’re not going to advance, evolve and get better. There’s lots of friction that goes on. You guys hear about some of it. You don’t hear about all of it. But it’s healthy friction. It’s friction debate, robust debate. It’s about what we see as good, and what we see as needs to be done. That happens all the time, and it has to happen. If that stops happening, then Irish rugby will plateau and, at worst, it might start to go backwards.”
Understandably, Nucifora began proceedings with reference to Ireland’s hugely successful five-match tour to New Zealand, which Johnny Sexton refers to as a 3-2 series win. While that may be the last tour of its type, the performance director did not rule out future summer tours to one country in World Cup and Lion years but admitted the proposed nations league was still not a done deal.
Full-blown tours
“I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve been listening to conversations about a global calendar now for 10 or 15 years. And we get close, and it falls over. So, there is nothing agreed yet, the concepts are there, and the concepts are on the table at the moment seem to have the most legs, [and] is one that would see tours not happen every summer but they could still happen every second year, ie World Cup and Lions years.
“They wouldn’t be full-blown tours for us for example. But there is still opportunities to work on touring. The competition structures would change in the other two years, it will involve … they are keen on creating a competition structure between north and south and it would involve playing one-off games down in the southern hemisphere, three games down in the south in June.
“The windows have gone around the full circle and got back to where we started, which was okay. We’re going to play three games in July and three or four in November and at the end of that you’ll have a winner.
“So, that’s probably what it is. You might get seven games (in addition to the Six Nations). That sounds incredibly simple but to get to that point of agreement on structure, finance, everything else, is unbelievably complicated, broadcast deals etc, etc. There is a lot to happen yet before I think we get to that next stage, but certainly, a lot of time and effort went on in there.”
