Rugby World Cup: The key clash the All Blacks cannot avoid

Just how smart a piece of business it was by Ian Foster to lure Joe Schmidt into the All Blacks set-up last year, and for the New Zealand Rugby board to approve the appointment,is only now starting to become apparent.

Schmidt brings many things to the All Blacks, but of most value is the knowledge he has about Ireland, the team he coached for eight years from 2013 to 2019.

Two things have become indisputable in the past month: one is that if the All Blacks are going to win the World Cup it’s almost certain they are going to have to beat Ireland to do it.

The All Blacks are destined to play either Ireland, South Africa or the fast-improving Scotland in the quarter-final.

If they avoid Ireland in that first play-off match, they might not be able to avoid them later as the men in green look destined to make the final. It’s starting to look inevitable that the big question every contender is going to have to ask themselves is whether they are good enough to beat Ireland.

And what’s become just as apparent, is that the odds of the All Blacks being able to beat Ireland have lengthened given the quality of rugby that has been on view in the Six Nations.

However good Ireland were when they toured New Zealand last year, they are now discernibly better and in delivering what was easily their least impressive performance of the Six Nations to date last weekend, paradoxically confirmed their readiness to win the World Cup.

Ireland were not impressive at all in their 34-20 defeat of Italy in Rome over the weekend. It was a struggle for them and if the Italians had kept their cool in the last 10 minutes, who knows, their 10-year wait for a home Six Nations victory may have been over.

But Ireland’s inability to find the cohesion and polish they produced against France in their previous game, and yet still get the job done, is precisely why they really are now going to come into the World Cup as the favourites.

Only the best teams — the sort that make history — can play nowhere near their potential and still win.

The All Blacks, in their great period between 2012 and 2015, were arguably the last great team that could confront the odd bad day, realise that nothing was clicking for them and yet find a way to somehow grind out the result.

Ireland did that in Rome. They were scrappy, disjointed and increasingly frustrated by an Italian side which must rank as the global game’s biggest improver of the past six months.

But Ireland didn’t succumb to that frustration and seemed to use their willpower to steer themselves to the finish line, and they also did it without their talisman Johnny Sexton, to partly dispel the theory that without their veteran play-maker, they aren’t the same team.

Ireland presumably do have weaknesses, it’s just that they are proving hard to detect and even harder for teams to exploit.

We won’t know if they have kicked their old habit of self-imploding at World Cups until the tournament kicks off and things get serious, but given the resilience they have shown in the last two years, it’s hard to believe they will crumble in France the way they have at previous tournaments.

And so this takes us back to Schmidt, who might just be able to find the crack in an Irish system that he can still feel partly responsible for creating.

Schmidt, it could be said, was the man who built the Irish foundations: took them through stage one of their journey from nearly-men to serious contenders.

Under Schmidt, the Irish learned how to win more big games than they lost. They learned the art of dealing with pressure on big occasions and how to retain confidence in a game plan.

But what Ireland didn’t build under Schmidt was the triple-threat they now pose.

The Irish were good but limited under Schmidt: Playing to a prescribed, low-risk formula that was built on their ability to retain possession and kick cleverly.

Now they can do it all — pass, run, kick — and they do it with self-belief and conviction.

For the All Blacks to beat them, it’s going to take a huge performance and the tiniest pieces of intelligence could prove invaluable.

His ability to offer up something, anything, that may prise open a crack in the Irish defence, or get under their skin, could tip the balance and bring sense to what appeared to be at times a chaotic process last year to bring him into the fold.