The reality of Irish rugby post-BOD strikes home in earnest on Saturday evening when, for the first time in 15 years, an Ireland side line up in Dublin without either Brian O’Driscoll nor Gordon D’Arcy.
Faced with South Africa, the second best team in the world and improving fast, Ireland’s head coach, Joe Schmidt, admits he is gambling with a new centre pairing of Robbie Henshaw, playing only his second Test in the No12 shirt, alongside Jared Payne, a 29-year-old New Zealander making his debut for his adoptive country.
From the O’Driscoll/D’Arcy partnership which ended the Six Nations with 212 caps between them, Schmidt enters the final year of his World Cup preparations with a centre pairing boasting three.
Schmidt’s side, who have been forced to reshuffle their front row as well, confront a South Africa team who ended the All Blacks’ run of 22 games undefeated and have acquired a sense of adventure to go with the physicality which he says will always be a concern, but which did not dominate his section thinking.
D’Arcy failed to shake off a calf problem early enough to take a meaningful part in training this week. However, there is more than a hint Schmidt is quite prepared to give his new midfield another chance even if Saturday’s game does not work out. “I don’t think that’s going to happen overnight,” he said of his new pairing.
“I think inevitably there are going to be things that we progress from this Saturday through the succeeding weekends, and there will be changes through the succeeding weekends. So this combination obviously won’t last throughout the series but I’m reasonably excited about seeing how they do adapt and acquit themselves in an incredibly challenging environment.”
As for the Springboks, 4-7 favourites even with Irish bookmakers, they are unchanged from the side who beat New Zealand. That was a month ago, whereas Ireland have played two summer Tests in Argentina since becoming Six Nations champions by beating France in Paris in March.
South Africa, who play England next week, have been together since mid-August with their coach, Heyneke Meyer, warning his players this autumn tour is not the end of their rugby year, rather the start of their World Cup campaign.
And then there is Handré Pollard, architect of that victory in Johannesburg as well as scorer of two tries. At 20 he is seen as the future whereas on Friday Paul O’Connell, the Ireland captain, went out of his way to praise one of the veterans in the Springbok ranks, and a the 37-year-old lock Victor Matfield, who has come out of retirement for another crack at the World Cup.
According to O’Connell, Matfield is “the best lineout forward in the world” and better now than when he retired for two years in 2011. Pollard may have added flair, said the Ireland captain, but Matfield has restored the steel missing from the Springboks when he was away.
“The way they’ve been playing with ball in hand recently, I just think they’ve an extra string to their bow that they maybe didn’t have when they won the World Cup, or they didn’t maybe use then or in 2009 [against the Lions]. So it makes the challenge even bigger again.”
