Sixteen years. That's how long it is since Ireland last marched into battle with so many uncapped players. After that 50-18 humiliation at Twickenham, Warren Gatland
named Simon Easterby, John Hayes, Ronan O’Gara, Peter Stringer and Shane Horgan in a starting XV to face Scotland that also saw Mick Galwey and Denis Hickie recalled from the outer reaches.
Ireland ran out 44-22 winners before a momentous victory in Paris heralded an era of limitless (not so proved) potential for the game on this island.
Ultan Dillane, Josh van der Flier and Stuart McCloskey are names to make the eyes of Richmond's tweed brigade glaze over. But here comes the Robbie Henshaw generation and a new breed of player is upon us.
“They’re too young to know what fear or pressure is,” said Keith Earls.
Declan Kidney made a premature and desperate attempt to introduce Paddy Jackson and Luke Marshall to the Test arena at Murrayfield in 2013. The currently flayed Iain Henderson earned his third cap in that miserable 12-8 loss which unnecessarily stalled Jackson’s rise.
Joe Schmidt’s enforced calling up of three uncapped men all 23 years or younger is somewhere in between the great leap of 2000 and the 2013 malaise.
Forward momentum
“Yeah, it’s bizarre isn’t it?,” said Schmidt of Henshaw and McCloskey becoming the biggest centre pairing to ever partner up for Ireland.
“It does offer an opportunity to get a bit of forward momentum, potentially, the one thing that would be a danger would be to call Stuart McCloskey a one-trick pony.
“He’s got the ability to pass in tight channels and the ability to pass across wide channels. We’d like to think that he can bring more to the role than just being used to carry the ball forward as a blunt instrument.
“It is a great opportunity for him to express himself and to make sure that we are as watertight as we can be in what will be a tough area to defend with some of the wing play that they have coming through there and with Owen Farrell and Jonathan Joseph testing him in those defensive channels.”
That fearless Bangor bluntness though, at 6ft 3in and 17-plus stone, has opened the road for a specialist openside in Van der Flier. The red-capped Wesley College graduate's climb from the Leinster Academy to his impressive showing amidst the brutality of back-to-back European meetings with Toulon's ferocious pack sees Tommy O'Donnell cut loose once again.
Huge responsibility
“Josh is rewarded with an opportunity and a huge responsibility to go out and capture that ‘7’ jersey in what will be a really tough test for him,” Schmidt said.
Dillane, it is hoped, will deliver on the wonderfully destructive yet raw potential he has displayed in all too brief outings for Connacht.
Raised in Paris until he was seven, his father hails from the Ivory Coast, but he experienced his formative years in Tralee before Connacht snatched him from beneath Munster.
That at least waylaid an easy comparison to Paul O’Connell’s flame-haired rise to prominence in 2002, as much as the country craves a similarity, but Earls put in to simple words those growing rumours about his power.
“I was doing a couple of tackling bags with Ultan there and it was like hitting a bull.”
John Hayes?
No, an actual bull.
“The weight of him. I said it to Johnny [Sexton] how heavy is that fellah. Normally you might drive him back a bit but it was just, bang. Stop,” Earls said.
That needs to be an Englishman’s words come Saturday evening if the 2000 comparison is to carry any water.
What is evident is they arrive as finely tuned athletes, primed for the physicality after a professional career that essentially began in their early teens.
“There’s definitely a difference. You mightn’t have seen it with me but I was always tormenting myself in my own head. They just come in as cool as the breeze, taking it all in their stride. I would have loved to have been like that at their age,” Earls said.
