In last year's 13-10 defeat to England in Twickenham, Ireland started the match with Peter O'Mahony, Chris Henry, Jamie Heaslip, Conor Murray, Johnny Sexton, Gordon D'Arcy and Brian O'Driscoll in what might be termed the team's executive leadership.
Exactly 12 months on, Ireland were seeing out a 19-9 win against England without all bar O’Mahony and Murray of the aforementioned backrow/halfback/midfield, as well as their early casualty last Sunday, Seán O’Brien, with Tommy O’Donnell, Jordi Murphy, Ian Madigan, Robbie Henshaw and Felix Jones effectively in their place.
None of the latter quintet has started even 10 Tests. They have a combined 45 caps to their names, most of them off the bench. By comparison, the five players they stood in for went into last season’s game with 319 caps between them.
It’s extraordinary really, how seamlessly newcomers or fringe players step in for more established and experienced players. It can be on the mornings of games – Dan Tuohy for Paul O’Connell against Scotland last season, Rhys Ruddock for Chris Henry against South Africa last November – or after the warm-up – Tommy O’Donnell for Seán O’Brien in Rome – or early in a game – O’Donnell for O’Brien again in the 25th minute last week.
It doesn’t seem to matter. The machine just chugs along. This, as much anything else, defines a team, or more pertinently a squad, under Joe Schmidt’s watch.
Scarcely credible
In the corresponding game 12 months previously, Ireland won 101 rucks, and lost seven for a 93.5 per cent return. Last Sunday they won 116 rucks, and lost a scarcely credible two, for a return of 98.39 per cent. England, for their part, were more or less the same, winning 72 and losing seven last season (91.1 per cent), and winning 85 rucks and again losing seven last Sunday for a 92.4 per cent return. And so efficient were Ireland with the ball that they afforded England only two scrums in the match.
How does he achieve this?
"It begins with Joe's organisation," Jono Gibbes, the current Clermont forwards' coach who had that role alongside Schmidt for three years at Leinster, told The Irish Times. "It's dispersed through each coach so there's absolute clarity for Feeky (scrum coach Greg Feek) with his role to get on with his job, which is making sure all the frontrow and the scrum detail is all there.
“It’s dispersed with Simon (Easterby) in the role of the forwards’ coach and with Paulie (O’Connell) at the lineout. Those messages get dispersed and obviously Kissy (Les Kiss) is a great defence coach anyway. The same coaching messages are coming through, whether it’s Joe in front of the group, or Simon.”
Gibbes takes the example of O’Donnell. “Fundamentally, what did he do during the game? He attacked his breakdown and he was accurate in his breakdown. He was accurate connecting in defence. He was accurate at the post-tackle. You are not asking the player to come in and do an X factor type thing, it’s just what makes it so effective is that it’s so accurate and precise.
“I think it’s the environment he creates and that clarity for the players, and that meticulous preparation, which allows it to appear to be easy during the game for a guy like Tommy O’Donnell. Even though it’s not easy, it looks easy, and that’s due to what goes on in Carton House. That would be the thing that I respect him the most for, is what he can create during the preparation.”
After the squad's 24-hour get-together in Belfast during the week, Simon Easterby shed some light on how it is Schmidt achieves such seamless efficiency from his team. "He's very detailed. He has a gameplan that everyone can buy into. There are no grey areas – we understand how the team are expected to play, in whatever facet of the game. That just makes it easier for players to be intensive. If you have a little bit of doubt, or players are unsure about certain things, then they can't do things at the level of intensity that you need.
“There is a great amount of detail that goes into the preparation, but there is also the understanding that the players know how to take it on to the pitch and put it into practice. They can only do that if they are clear about what they are doing. That’s true with the way we want to attack, but also with how we play without the ball. Les (Kiss) and Joe put a lot of work into that, too.”
It’s this workload at the start of the week which means that come Thursday’s session, never mind match day, everyone must know their roles. Thursday is no place for getting something wrong in Schmidt’s match week.
“And it’s the right workload too,” says Gibbes. “The stuff that’s being worked on has an actual, tangible connection to performance on Saturday.”
Physical freshness
Training sessions are short, 45 or 50 minutes, so as to maximise physical freshness come match-day. “But if you want to have 45 or 50 minute trainings, of high intensity, you better know your shit beforehand,” says Gibbes with a chuckle. “I’m sure that between the coaches and Sexton, because he’s the game leader, and Paulie with the lineouts, I’m sure that there are tactical things that go on which are normal, but I think he drives actual performance things, and he’s getting those right probably more than other coaches at the moment. His results speak for themselves in that.”
His players repeatedly liken being in an Irish camp to being back at school, and there’s no doubt Schmidt’s own intuitive understanding of how to educate a classroom manifests itself in his coaching methods. In addition to delegating responsibility to his assistant coaches, Schmidt also understands he cannot speak in the same way all the time to his squad/classroom or else they will stop paying attention.
Brian O’Driscoll makes no qualms about citing Schmidt as the best coach he ever worked with, and Schmidt’s accession to the Irish coaching job was a major factor in him prolonging his career for another year – a decision that was, of course, handsomely rewarded.
“I’ve never seen a coach show such massive attention to detail, or one with such a smart rugby brain,” O’Driscoll said in his autobiography. “He makes little tweaks in a back-line play and all of a sudden an opposition defence opens up in front of you. And you look over at him and he’s smiling.
“He’s a players’ coach, because he notices what you do. If you’re a workhorse, doing your stuff unseen by almost everyone, he knows you’ve done the work. If you do something seven phases before a try is scored that no one is giving you credit for, he gives you the credit.”
"It's no secret how good he is as a coach," Rob Kearney said of Schmidt in Irish Tatler Man this month. "If he ran for presidency at the moment, he'd probably be there or thereabouts. He's a superb coach. I've been lucky enough to work with him with Leinster and then to go straight into Ireland with him.
“He’s done a huge amount for my game and developed me as a player. If you sat in on one of our Monday morning meetings with Joe, you’d see a list of 20 things that I would need to improve on.”
Ah, the famous Monday morning sessions. Oh, to be a fly on the wall. Schmidt seems a tad put out that the unforgiving and detailed criticisms of his players in those review sessions have become such public knowledge. Training sessions are conducted behind a pitch-enveloping screen at their Carton House base, with security staff staving off any prying eyes. This could act as a metaphor for Schmidt’s Ireland. He hates the cat being let out of the bag in any sense. But too late now.
There was a nice moment at last Sunday’s post-match press conference where Paul O’Connell – by now as much a devotee of the Schmidt way as O’Driscoll ever was – was asked if this was the best Ireland side he’d ever played in. “It’s close to it. I think we’re doing a lot of things really well. The way we’re preparing is a lot different to what we’ve done throughout my time here and I think the game-by-game focus really suits us.
“It suits Irish teams, Irish people. I’m sure the coaches look at the bigger picture but for us, I know the way the preparation for Wales will go. There’ll be a fairly brutal review of this game.”
An aghast Schmidt raised his eyes incredulously and quietly questioned the “brutality” of the next day’s review, before O’Connell carried on. “And we’ll be put under pressure to prepare certain things for the Welsh game. That will be the sole focus for the players and it works well for us. It gets the best out of us.
“There’s a lot of competition for places,” added O’Connell, identifying another key factor in the way players seamlessly interchange without unduly affecting the efficiency of the machine, “which means when guys come in and get an opportunity like Tommy O’Donnell against Italy or today, or Jordi (Murphy) today, guys are prepared and they really go after it and take it and it puts pressure on the coaches, it puts pressure on guys who may come back in. Look, it’s creating a brilliant set-up and an exciting set-up to be involved in.”
Nice guys
Yet Schmidt is also proof nice guys can be winners. Former Wasps and England outhalf
Alex King
was an assistant coach alongside Schmidt at Clermont between 2007 and 2010. “Joe was just one of those coaches players wanted to play for,” says King, now a coach at Northampton. “He put the work in off the field, making himself fluent in French, which was one of the reasons the guys took to him so readily.
“And Joe’s got good values, that’s his greatest quality. He’s constant, so you know exactly where you stand with him and what he expects of you. He’s a top bloke, a real laugh who likes the occasional Guinness and has an amazing wife (Kellie) and four kids. Joe shows that you don’t have to be a bully to get results.”
As someone once said of Schmidt, he has good laughter lines. He’s intelligent, engaging, witty, likeable and, as King says, is not a bully. Yet there is an underlying fear amongst his players which drives Schmidt’s demands that, in addition to mastering basic skills and their own individual roles, they must be constantly working on helping their team-mates. Underpinning this is a fear of not being found out in those Monday morning reviews and specifically a fear of not being seen to let your team-mates down.
‘Absolutely buggered’
“Jamie Heaslip put it pretty well once when we had Bath in our pool at the Rec,” recalls Gibbes, “and the ball got kicked long down the field. He was absolutely buggered but he just started running because all he could think was ‘I’m not going to be pulled apart on Monday’. That’s a humorous take on it.
“Look, it’s a great story and those Monday morning reviews have grown their own legs. Certainly by the time he was at the end with Leinster he didn’t even have to say anything on Monday. The players could see the footage and know exactly what he was going to say and pipe up. But I think one of the reasons why the Monday sessions are so ruthless is because he drives teamwork.
“You’re either working your socks off for someone, or in the middle of work, or you’re getting off the ground and getting back up to work, because it’s a game for teamwork. You rely on each other. Okay, there are individuals that change the course of a game but it’s the collective strength of the group which is the main thing.
“In my mind, I don’t think he ever personalised something on a Monday session, but that’s not to say he wasn’t harsh. But he was only harsh because the individual may have affected the performance of the other players, and that was the point he was making.
“And he’s highly intelligent, and he can use bigger words than I can. He’s smart, he’s got a good way about him, but he doesn’t accept people letting their teammates down.”
Schmidt’s teams simply have to work harder than their opponents, and to this end there is never any hiding place.
