IQ the next step in the development of Irish rugby, but is it smart?

“So just how strong is Northern Hemisphere rugby – when the likes of Ireland, Scotland and even Britain are basically strip mining the Southern Hemisphere rugby for talent?”

I was reminded of this recent comment on The Roar as various news stories emerged in the last couple of weeks in Ireland and Britain.

First up, the Scottish rugby union announced it was launching a programme to identity Scottish-qualified talent in England, headed up by a specialist team. Many Scottish players are already in France and England with tacit support from their union who can’t afford to keep them, and who need to keep adding to the Scottish pool of players.

Two days later, a media report leaked that the English RFU was planning to complain to World Rugby about other unions targeting and poaching their academy talent without appropriate compensation.

The reaction from their bordering neighbours in Wales and Scotland was near apoplectic as people searched for words to describe the hypocrisy of such an accusation with plenty of pointing fingers in return.

Ireland waited and watched, and then continued making their plans.

This week, Simon Zebo, the 35-cap Irish winger and all time try scorer at Munster said he was leaving at end of season to an unspecified club (but quickly narrowed down to Racing92 in Paris) for a reported salary twice what he currently earns. Just 36 hours later, Joe Schmidt announced his Ireland squad for the November Internationals against South Africa, Fiji and Argentina.

Zebo wasn’t on the list. The message was loud and clear – play outside Ireland at your international Test peril.

In seeking to hold the line on only selecting Irish-qualified players in Ireland over the last five years or so, the IRFU has headed down the slippery slope of qualifying uncapped players through residency. They do so while primarily trying to restrict the number of foreign-capped players in the country whose salaries are becoming increasingly unaffordable compared to their wealthy English and French counterparts and blocking the paths of domestic talent.

Schmidt’s 38-man November squad included four new uncapped players – notably Jacob Stockdale, the rising star winger for Ulster, and Bundee Aki, the Connacht midfielder. Aki is one of two residency qualified players in the squad, the other being CJ Stander.

No surprises really that the Kiwi midfielder has been included in the squad, although his selection for a match-day 23 is not a certainty with much greater depth nationally from when he first arrived in Ireland.

It was all so different when the professional game started in 1995. Ireland couldn’t buy a win for the first five years, losing 70 per cent of their Test matches with a hodgepodge of Irish and English-based players.

(Conor Lawless / Flickr / CC BY 2.0)

The IRFU finally put money into the provinces and got professional. From 2000-2003, Ireland played 47 matches and won 32 of them – a 70 per cent win rate. They beat Australia for the first time since their successful tour down under in 1979. The player names and their foreign club names changed too.

In all, 90 Irish-born players were capped over the next decade with just three parentage players being capped.

And then, Ireland hit a speed bump. The provincial teams had been developing further and further with Munster finally breaking through on the European scene to win the Heineken Cup in 2006. Irish teams won the Heineken Cup five times in the next seven years.

Their success was due in part to the presence of high-profile capped foreign players who had been creeping into club squads over time. The IRFU began to set quotas on the number of foreign players in the three main squads of Ulster, Leinster and Munster. But there was no real plan and position depth continued to suffer at Test level.

Ireland’s performance in Rugby World Cup 2011 and lack of player depth finally pushed the IRFU into more specific action. In December that year, they launched the Player Succession Strategy – a set of “guidelines’ for Ulster, Munster and Leinster to follow in contracting foreign players with a view to developing Irish-qualified players and have at least two Test quality players in every position.

The three provinces (Connacht was excluded as a development province) could only recruit 15 players in total, each representing a playing position. Each province was allowed four non-Irish Eligible players and one ‘special project’ player who could become Irish qualified. If Leinster got a foreign hooker, then the other two couldn’t have one.

The provinces continued to largely focus on recruiting experienced capped players, with Leinster even bringing in Brad Thorn for a short-term stint in the third Heineken Cup winning season.

Another 18 Irish-born caps flowed into the squad as Joe Schmidt took over the national reins. David Nucifora came on board with the IRFU as High Performance Director. Neither he nor Schmidt suffered fools gladly and weren’t fazed by a critical media.

Schmidt said he was going to use whatever players at his disposal to build a better, deeper squad for Rugby World Cup 15. His success at Leinster had garnered him a lot of credit in the public bank. Robbie Diack, a South African playing for Ulster since 2008, got his first cap, six years later in 2014.

In the same squad, Rodney Ah You, a young New Zealand player who had initially moved to Connacht only on an 18-month injury contract in 2010, benefited from a sudden injury to Marty Moore, and went on a tour to Argentina to win the first of three caps for Ireland.

Next up was an actual special project player – Jared Payne. Payne had arrived into Ulster in full media glare on a three-year contract that would get him residency-qualified and ready for Test action.

This was planned with deliberation. Payne proved his worth, and became a mainstay of Schmidt’s side, with the Kiwi’s defensive nous a welcome replacement for the departed duo of O’Driscoll and Darcy. Now 32, and still injured from the Lions tour, he may well have played his last Test for his adopted country.

The critics of the system didn’t have long to wait before another fortunate player, Nathan White, was handed a Test cap at the ripe age of 34.

In a recent interview, White who retired from the game last year and now coaches at Connacht, laughed about the notion about him being seen as a project player. ““Not at all, I had a one-year contract with Leinster” said White of any initial thoughts of playing for Ireland. “I was probably looking at that one year and then it was basically ‘what are we going to do after that?’ Connacht came along and we had enjoyed our time in Dublin, and thought it would be nice to stay in Ireland. The kids really enjoy it here.” Connacht gave him another year, and then extended it. Four years on, he became cap number 1070.

Schmidt went to Rugby World Cup 2015 and again got found out on player depth when six Irish first team players injured for the quarter-final against Argentina.

They were trounced. Schmidt agreed to another four-year contract to have a tilt at Rugby World Cup 2019, and this time, Nucifora and the IRFU were going to ensure there was sufficient depth of IQ players in Ireland.

(AP Photo/Kamil Krzaczynski)

A year later, another South African player joined the Test team in the shape of CJ Stander who had been playing his footy in SA. As the story goes, he got knocked back by the Boks and decided to look further afield.

Munster was looking for a 6/8 but their quota of foreign players was full. And Ireland wasn’t short of backrowers. They were backing up in Leinster between O’Brien, Ruddock, Leavy, van der Flier, et al but none of them wanted to move to Munster.

In the end, Munster got their man, but only on a two-year contract to run until 2014. He was nominated as a ‘project player’, even though they already had one – Gerhard van den Heever – who was not working out and left the following year. Stander had his contract renewed.

Following Rugby World Cup 2015, Schmidt handed him his first Irish cap in the 2016 Six Nations.

Quinn Roux had also come to Leinster on a short-term one-year contract. He was then loaned out to Connacht. With a contract extension, four years later, Schmidt capped him on the tour to South Africa in 2016.

Ironically, despite the Player Succession Programme guidelines only applying to Ulster, Leinster and Munster, it is Connacht that has generated the most amounts of residency-qualified players who were capped through fortuitous circumstance rather than any planned project programme.

Next up for possible Ireland selection is another Connacht player – Bundee Aki. He’s fortunate enough that two players with capped experience are out of contention in November – Garry Ringrose and Stuart Olding.

Aki trained with the wider Ireland squad last month but his selection isn’t a slam-dunk with other players boosting for contention, particularly Ulster’s Stuart McCloskey and Munster’s Chris Farrell, both named in the November squad.

Tyler Bleyendaal, a 10/12 for Munster will residency qualify in January but his teammate and rival outhalf, Ian Keatley, and Leinster’s Ross Byrne may see it differently to get the bench spot for Sexton.

As some of these residency players move out of possible contention, others may come into view in the future – Rhys Marshall, hooker, Jean Kleyn, lock -both at Munster, and Jamison Gibson Park, a back-up scrum half at Leinster are two years away from consideration before the final curtain falls.

So will it all stop and when? While the new five-year residency regulation doesn’t begin until one Jan 2021, in effect, it starts from one Jan 2018, after which any player contracted would have to wait five years before qualifying.

Recognising that the foreign player residency route was short-term, Nucifora and the IRFU have been investing over €10m in the last 2.5 years in the new Domestic Pathway Programme which has seen 80 players enter the four provincial academies on 3-year development programmes. By 2023, the intent is to have four-player depth in each position feeding a 60 player wider Test squad, according to Nucifora.

This season’s November squad has 38 names in it. There are six Irish qualified through parentage – some arriving at an early age.

Dillane, France (age 7), Carbery, New Zealand (11), Marmion, Eng (17), Luke McGrath Canada (8), Herring, SA (19), Treadwell, Eng (20).

In the last three years approx, 32 Irish born players were capped under the age of 25.

If you consider who has actually been capped since 2012 and for how long:
Payne 20 caps (finished?), Strauss 17, (finished), Stander 15, White 13,(ret’d) Ah You 3, (finished) Roux 3, Diack 1, then it doesn’t make for exciting reading for residency player hopefuls.

Perhaps the biggest pointer for the future is a move by the IRFU last May following the WR announcement about extending residency. The IRFU quietly launched the IQ Rugby programme that seeks to find and develop already Irish-qualified playing talent and bring them into the provincial system where appropriate.

This will be done through the long-established Exiles branch of the union based in the UK. A number of players have already been identified and brought into playing in Ireland this season, including Kieran Treadwell from UK, and Chris Farrell and James Hart from France. JJ Harrahan rejoined the fly-half ranks at Munster.

As Simon Zebo prepares to leave for France next June, he knows there’s already a queue of 4-5 young players waiting and eager to take his place, playing in the provinces, ready to be part of the IQ generation.

Hopefully, the project player is dead. Say hello to IQ.

Ireland November Squad

Forwards: Rory Best (Ulster) (Captain), Jack Conan (Leinster), Ultan Dillane (Connacht), Tadhg Furlong (Leinster), Cian Healy (Leinster), Iain Henderson (Ulster), Rob Herring (Ulster), Dave Kilcoyne (Munster), Dan Leavy (Leinster), Jack McGrath (Leinster), Sean O’Brien (Leinster), Tommy O’Donnell (Munster), Peter O’Mahony (Munster), Andrew Porter (Leinster), Rhys Ruddock (Leinster), James Ryan (Leinster), John Ryan (Munster), CJ Stander (Munster), Devin Toner (Leinster), James Tracy (Leinster), Kieran Treadwell (Ulster)
Backs: Bundee Aki (Connacht) uncapped, Adam Byrne (Leinster) uncapped, Joey Carbery (Leinster), Andrew Conway (Munster), Keith Earls (Munster), Chris Farrell (Munster) uncapped, Robbie Henshaw (Leinster), Dave Kearney (Leinster), Rob Kearney (Leinster), Ian Keatley (Munster), Kieran Marmion (Connacht), Stuart McCloskey (Ulster), Luke McGrath (Leinster), Conor Murray (Munster), Johnny Sexton (Leinster), Jacob Stockdale (Ulster), Darren Sweetnam (Munster) uncapped