Safe to say, Andy Farrell is experiencing no World Cup hangover at all. “I’m over it,” he said at the launch of the 2024 Six Nations Championship in Dublin on Monday, his sole focus now on taking this Irish team to where no Irish team has gone before: winning back-to-back Grand Slams. So, after “that acutely anticlimactic quarter-final defeat by New Zealand,” as Gerry Thornley describes it, for Farrell it’s now about getting “back on the horse”, starting with the small matter of that trip to Marseille for the Six Nations opener against France on Friday week.
Sitting alongside Farrell in the Guinness Storehouse was Peter O’Mahony, Johnny Watterson hearing the coach pay tribute to his new captain, describing him as an “authentic” “natural leader”. “There are certain people that walk into a room and they make the room feel right,” he said, by now the ever humble O’Mahony probably overheating from the blushing. He described his selection as Johnny Sexton’s successor as “one of the biggest honours of my career”, but he wasn’t up for talking about his much-discussed contract situation. Monday, he said, was all about the Six Nations.
He was probably happy to take his mind off club matters for a bit too after Munster’s less than smooth Champions Cup ride thus far, Gerry reflecting on “a noticeably disappointing campaign by the provinces”, even Leinster not quite scaling “the all-conquering heights of their serene and prolific jaunts through their last three pool campaigns”.
Owen Doyle, meanwhile, writes about “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” he witnessed in last weekend’s games, the ugly represented by “a couple of nasty incidents of dangerous play, involving both the use of boot and knee”, Finlay Bealham and Tom Ahern on the receiving end.
In Gaelic games, Gordon Manning salutes Conor Glass for his performance in Sunday’s All Ireland club final, the Derry man “now one of the most influential, respected and feared footballers in the country”. And Gordon also brings news that only 19 of 42 eligible football referees passed recent fitness evaluations (10 of the 23 that didn’t pass didn’t actually undertake the test), suggesting that they enjoyed Christmas as much as the rest of us. The GAA insists, though, that “there is no shortage of referees for the opening weekend of the 2024 National Football League”.
And in horse racing, Brian O’Connor looks ahead to Saturday night in Miami where Aidan O’Brien’s Warm Heart will be among the favourites in the $1 million Pegasus World Cup Turf Invitational. And then? She’s facing “a likely date at the breeding shed”. The romance of it.
TV Watch: There’s more live action from the Australian tennis Open, the tournament now at the quarter-final stage (Eurosport, up to 1.30pm). Later, Sky Sports have four more games from the African Cup of Nations – Guinea v Senegal (5.0), Gambia v Cameroon (5.0), Angola v Burkina Faso (8.0) and Mauritania v Algeria (8.0) – as well as the second leg of the League Cup semi-final between Chelsea and Middlesbrough (8.0), with Chelsea a goal down from the first.
