Mack Hansen has been named to start on the right wing in Ireland’s World Cup quarter-final clash against New Zealand at the Stade de France on Saturday night (kick-off 9pm local time/8pm Irish) despite being unable to train all week due to the calf injury he suffered in last weekend’s win over Scotland.
Hence, the same starting XV which completed a fourth win in four games to top Pool B with that handsome 36-14 victory over Scotland has been retained, but there are a couple of changes on the bench.
As expected, James Ryan was also ruled out with the hand injury he suffered against Scotland after coming on for the last 32 minutes, with Joe McCarthy preferred to Ryan Baird on the bench. In a less expected move, Jimmy O’Brien has been named in a match-day squad for the first time, in place of Stuart McCloskey.
Despite his versatility, O’Brien had been the only player in the original 33-man squad not to feature in the tournament thus far, and thus he is in line for a World Cup debut against the All Blacks. It’s tough on Baird and on McCloskey, although perhaps given any ongoing concern over Hansen’s wellbeing and the desire not to have Jamison Gibson-Park end up on the wing again, contributed to O’Brien being included.
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Andy Farrell maintained that Hansen would be fit for the quarter-final. “He is, yeah. He obviously had a few things to do at the beginning of the week, he’s coming good and everyone is very confident that he’s going to be fine for the game – no problems.”
The Irish head coach also confirmed that the game came too quickly for the hamstrung pair of Earls and Robbie Henshaw, neither of whom were therefore options, but that ala James Ryan, all would be fit for a semi-final should this Irish team go where no other Irish team has gone before.
The inclusion of the 22-year-old McCarthy, the youngest player in the squad, was reward for “just how he’s progressed, and his fight and his want to be involved is very evident to us all throughout, not just the preseason and the warm-up games, but since he’s not been playing over the last couple of weeks,” said Farrell.
“We keep seeing him grow the whole time and it’s time for him to be out into a big game like this. He’s certainly going to add to our performance when he comes off the bench.
“And Jimmy, what you don’t probably realise is that Jimmy got a knock on his shoulder during the Samoa game and he was certainly out for the first two games of the World Cup for us.
“But there’s one thing about Jimmy O’Brien, he’s unbelievably smart, nice and cool and calm and collected, unbelievably fit and he’s unbelievably good at fitting in numerous different positions, so with the little bit of disruption that we’ve had at the start of the week it just makes more sense for us to go with that option.
Asked if the mood in the Irish camp was different now that the World Cup had entered the knock-out stages, Farrell countered by noting: “Well, we was in it last week, so it’s the same mood, it’s the big boys stuff. It’s the business end of the competition and when you get to those points within a competition then you draw hopefully on good experiences that you’ve had and the experiences that we’ve put ourselves under in the last three or four years were for moments like this.
Of course, no Irish team has ever progressed beyond the quarter-finals, where Ireland have lost in seven of the previous nine World Cups, but then again no Irish team has ever produced such a body of work to this juncture before.
And as Johnny Sexton also put it: “We’ve worked on our mental game for the last four years. We’ve put ourselves in different scenarios over the last four years to prepare for this. But each quarter-final that we haven’t got through, or when we haven’t got through our pool, they’ve all been different and it’s a different group again.
“Each of those groups lost once, it wasn’t the same group losing quarter-finals year after year. If it was club rugby it would probably be a bigger hurdle, but it’s a different group. I don’t think we’re carrying much baggage. It’s a one-off game and we’ve got to prepare for it now.”
Whatever has happened in the past or the future, Sexton is living in the here and now like never before and his motivation is crystal clear, and is not affected or inhibited by outside noise or other considerations.
“Trying to win a World Cup, it’s something to go and get, it’s not something that puts pressure on me, it’s something you dream of, probably not as a kid because when we were kids we didn’t dream of Ireland winning the World Cup. I suppose we’ve put ourselves in a position now to go and do that.
“But it’s something to go and get, it’s not something to be pressured about. I haven’t thought about my career, to be honest, I’ll think about it more when I finish. It’s all geared up towards a massive game on Saturday, a massive challenge for this team, the biggest we’ve faced, and we’re looking forward to it.”
IRELAND: Keenan; Hansen, Ringrose, Aki, Lowe; Sexton (capt), Gibson-Park; Porter, Sheehan, Furlong; Beirne, Henderson; O’Mahony, van der Flier, Doris.
Replacements: Kelleher, Kilcoyne, Bealham, McCarthy, Conan, Murray, Crowley, O’Brien.
