New Zealand bring Schmidt’s fairytale reign to an end (2024)

Joe Schmidt has been Ireland’s most successful coach. Ever. It shouldn’t have ended like this, on an evening in Tokyo that his team got smashed. Bugs crushed on the windscreen of an articulated truck, they hardly knew what hit them. At the end the wonder was how Ireland ever thought they could compete with these All Blacks.

The irony is they brought it on themselves. Two Ireland victories in three years got New Zealand’s attention. The consequences of that were brutal. This was the performance the All Blacks reserve for those who dare to threaten them. And confronted by the toughest questions, Ireland had no answers.

Worse than that, they knew it. That made them anxious, pressurised them into over-reaching. Passes were dropped, tackles missed, communication broke down. Johnny Sexton missed with two penalty kicks to touch and Jacob Stockdale forgot everything he’d ever learnt about defending. Everything he touched in 2018 turned into a try; it was he who made the difference against the All Blacks 11 months ago.

After the final whistle sounded at the Tokyo stadium he went down on one knee, his head in his hands, separated from the rest of the team. Josh van der Flier and then Iain Henderson went to him, embraced and reminded him they were all in it together. Teams seldom get days as bad as this but from the earliest minutes there were signs that Ireland were heading towards a train wreck.

Garry Ringrose and Robbie Henshaw made a double tackle on Ardie Savea, stopped him in his tracks but split each other’s heads in doing so. Each would have to leave the field to get their wounds treated. Stuff like that doesn’t often happen but when the All Blacks play with power, scorching pace and terrifying skill, teams are hustled into making mistakes. Ireland spilt the ball five times in the first 20 minutes. By then they were two tries down and on life support.

“When we had the opportunity to breathe in the match,” said Schmidt, “we gave them back oxygen by missing touch. They missed one tackle in the first half, we missed about 10.”

Forty-five minutes after the game ended they began to troop from their changing room. They hadn’t showered or changed back into civilian clothes but still wore their green shirts and their white shorts. “It’s not often that you get a changing room that is deadly silent,” said the captain Rory Best, who was playing his last match for Ireland.

“There were big men in tears,” he added. “That’s what happens when you put your heart and soul into something. “

Best has been a successful and much admired leader of this Ireland team. As Schmidt has been an outstanding coach. Nobody in the camp wanted their last experience to be their worst but that’s what it was. How could anybody have suspected that Conor Murray would have a bad evening with his box-kicking when for season after season he had been lauded as perhaps the best box-kicker in the game? Who could have foreseen that when the team, two tries down, created a neat opportunity down the left, Rob Kearney should mistime his run onto Sexton’s pass and not just lose the chance of a try but present New Zealand with the opportunity to break clear and score at the other end. It might have been 17-7, instead it was 22-nil. “You don’t need to invite the All Blacks,” said Schmidt afterwards. That’s what Ireland did though.

Schmidt didn’t try to conceal the extent of his disappointment afterwards. “Heartbroken wouldn’t be too far away from how I feel and how the players feel right now. You tend to carry your scars a lot more than your successes and those scars are deep and that’s why I am little bit broken by it.”

He was asked whether he felt his legacy had now been tarnished. “There’s been some incredibly good days and I don’t think they get washed away by two bad days [this defeat and the 2015 quarter-final loss to Argentina] and days where we were incredibly disappointed,” he said.

As disappointed as they were for their head coach and their captain, the Ireland players also felt for their huge support inside the stadium who delivered a thunderous rendition of The Fields of Athenry during the All Blacks haka.

Before addressing questions about his team, New Zealand coach Steve Hansen paid tribute to the retiring Best and the departing Schmidt: “They made a difference and it doesn’t matter what team you’re involved with, if you can make a difference when you’re there, you’ve done your job.”

Schmidt’s assessment of what had gone wrong came with the usual clarity and insight. “After you hit a height,” he said referring to Ireland’s miracle year in 2018, “there’s always a little bit of a drop.”

Schmidt coached Ireland to three Six Nations titles, including a Grand Slam. His Ireland won in Australia and South Africa, they twice beat the All Blacks. This was a bad defeat and there have been others but Hansen was right. He made a difference.

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