Tipping Point: Joe Schmidt in a no-win situation at World Cup

Did you know Ireland are just 3/1 to make the rugby World Cup Final? And that's best price. Some sentimental bookies are only going 2/1. Sea The Stars was 11/4 when he won the Derby, and he was the greatest mortal lock ever to look through a bridle.

Of course bookie prices are an indicator of supply and demand and there is massive supply of optimism surrounding the Irish team’s chances for a tournament which kicks off at Twickenham on Friday.

There is a draw which has opened up the theoretical prospect of a quarter-final clash with Argentina, a semi-final with England or Wales or Australia, and once in the final, well, on the day, bounce of a ball, you never know. And it's an optimism that creates a mountainous demand on Joe Schmidt.

The Irish coach is Irish now too, recently ‘citizened’, garlanded with ‘warrior’ status, judiciary and government giddily flinging laurels at his feet, entreating the Praetor of the Pack to come home with the William Webb Ellis Trophy.

When trashy populist rags like The Irish Times have magazine covers headlined "In Joe We Trust", there's no doubting Schmidt's ubiquity or popularity, to the extent it would be fascinating to quantify exactly how much of this optimism can be pinned to the coach's reputation.

The ‘guys-and-gainline’ gang have bought into Schmidt big-time. Normally crusty consuls of rugby’s public opinion paint a picture of the native New Zealander possessed of some mysterious third rugger eye, one which makes his hopelessly two-eyed opposition sitting ducks in the face of his sideline smarts.

Schmidt, we’re assured, is Ireland’s trump card, the analytical maestro pulling the strings of those protein-binged behemoths on the park into something greater even than the sum of their parts.

Despite this, and to his credit, Schmidt himself appears to be an admirably low-key character, eager to focus on the abilities of his players, and averse to employing some of the more extreme jargon attached to the business of pushing and shoving.

The evidence of back-to-back Six Nation titles testifies to undoubted skill and substance at the job of getting international players to play, a job spec which might be a clue as to who are actually at the centre of what’s about to happen – the actual players.

It’s worth pointing this out because plenty appear determined to portray Schmidt as the latest of our messianic sporting leaders.

Trusting in an omniscient mastermind is an instinct much of the rest of the world dispenses with in adolescence but one to which in this country we appear stubbornly attached. Maybe it’s a Catholic thing, the whole big guy at the top bit, Taoiseach, Duce, Fuh...well, you get the point.

Ingrained

We love our sporting Generalissimos. The cult of the coach has become ingrained in the GAA. But we really relish, though, the mastermind from over the sea, bringing as they do a touch of the exotic unknown to a place where few are more than two steps away from someone gynaecologically familiar with their pedigree.

Trapattoni before it got ugly is the classic example: Italian football aristocracy sent to deliver us to finals salvation. It’s a tough ask now to recall the worship that greeted his arrival and which perhaps inversely contributed to the final bitterness surrounding a reign which did indeed deliver qualification, just not in the appropriate style.

That Martin O’Neill too has had to recognise he’s dealing with a largely willing, sound-hearted but essentially limited bunch of players who are never going to be mistaken for football aesthetes still hasn’t put a stop to dizzying emotional fluctuations which run from stratospheric high to flagellating low by pole-vaulting over mundane reality.

Schmidt is actually on a hiding to nothing over the next month, to the extent the only way he can win is maybe by actually winning the thing.

Manic intensity

Every coach though can only work with what they have. What Schmidt has is a first-15 capable of beating any one on any one day. Ireland has a World Cup history with such single days when fate, injuries and manic intensity lined up to produce one-off results. Getting to a final requires putting such days back-to-back, and back again.

Do the Irish team have that in them? Maybe they do, but if they don’t it will hardly be Schmidt’s fault, something that will quite probably be forgotten in the fallout should the team be judged to have under-performed and a convenient target for the blame-game is required.

Schmidt knows it’s a hazard of the job that the coach is usually the one to get it in the neck but hasn’t had to experience first-hand just how fast the worm can turn in his new country.

Hopefully he won’t have to. Theoretically this Irish team have it in them to surpass anything previously achieved by the national side, maybe at a stretch – and it’s a big stretch – even indeed win it. But the level of popular presumption which makes making the final just a 3/1 proposition looks preposterous.

That’s not defeatist, just realistic. Since when do we presume on beating the French? Wales, England or Australia, are hardly quaking at the idea of Ireland. Argentina have beaten South Africa, more recently than Ireland have, and in Durban too. Ireland aren’t alone in fancying themselves on any day.

And even if every day goes swimmingly, there's the prospect of New Zealand waiting at the end. It's an old formula but hardly redundant to ask how many of the Irish team would get on the All Black side?

You don’t need a second hand to tick them off. And no supposed sorcery can change that.