The Ireland squad will not be limited or defined by external perception.
So, suggesting that the players have had a long season, while true, or that Leinster and Munster suffered disappointment in the closing throes of the season, also true, it won’t impact on their mental acuity in preparing for Saturday’s first Test against South Africa at Loftus Versfeld.
It’s not that Andy Farrell’s players are oblivious to the challenges of taking on the two-time and reigning world champions but the IRFU’s performance coach Gary Keegan summed up the collective mindset succinctly.
“Two games against the world champions in their own backyard, it’s important to us. The next step. I think we’ve always looked to elevate the opportunity, and this is a big opportunity for us.”
The coaching group and squad have been here before, in advance of the 2022 tour to New Zealand, when the outside ‘consensus’ was that three Tests against the All Blacks and two matches against the New Zealand Maori was rugby masochism.
The group stands in the foothills of another extreme adventure, the suggestion that they are ready to summit again will be validated over the next two Saturdays in Pretoria and Durban. The acute disappointment of a World Cup quarter-final defeat to New Zealand was followed by winning the Six Nations Championship.
The need to get better, to be better is a continuous process, which Keegan pointed to when asked specifically about the opening quarter of that defeat to the All Blacks, because it has a bearing on the task in hand at the weekend, in being sharp from Luke Pearce’s opening whistle at Loftus Versfeld.
“We’re doing a lot of work in this space. We feel we’ve made significant progress. I would say the context of our mental game is that there’s always room for more growth because it’s a shifting space. But we’re on it, we’re targeting it on a continuous basis.
“The players are much more open about the space as a collective, so it’s not like secret conversations with people in corners out of the view of everyone else. The group is much more open and much more mature about how they approach their mental game and how they prepare for it.”
What makes strong minds?
Keegan explained: “Work. If they do the right work, they’re standing on a very solid platform. They’re in a very, very challenging environment in this context. We’re always pushing them, trying to get out of our comfort zone and find some new growth within ourselves.
“So, when you trust that work, that becomes your evidence for your performance. We speak about that a lot, if we do the right work, focus on the right things, we’ve a platform to perform.
“We also have stuff in there around the strategies and tools from a mental game perspective that potentially they didn’t have access to before. It’s making sure they’re integrating them from a rugby perspective.”
Keegan said that he hadn’t watched the Springboks documentary, Chasing the Sun and when asked about the component parts that go into the make-up of a team that regularly wins tight games, as South Africa repeatedly did in the World Cup, he explained: “It’s hard for us to observe from the outside why a team is like South Africa and what it’s able to do.
“It’s very hard for us to observe that from the outside. That’s the piece you can’t see, it’s very hard to analyse that because it’s potentially cultural, it’s potentially a mindset piece that they’ve built within the group and don’t really talk about much. Whereas you can observe how they play rugby but not how they prepare mentally.
“I focus on the group that we have, not comparing us against anyone else. I don’t like the idea of going into a space and trying to pull something out of a space and trying to apply it here.
“We’re from a very different journey than they are, we’re at different stages, so I very much focus on the context we’re in, where we’re at, what we’re trying to achieve, and making the right next step as opposed to ‘they’re doing this, let us do this.’”
Keegan made the point that no one is indispensable, and it’s work in this area that will help Ireland to realise goals.
“That’s what empowerment is. We don’t want any dependencies here. If we’re dependent on an individual player, and I know we have exceptional players, but if we’re depending on an individual player, we’re at risk.
“It has to be the collective. We have to build a greater depth of leadership. There’s been a very significant piece of work done in that time.”
Saturday will provide a robust benchmark.
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