But if not now, when? Rivers of green trickle out of the stadium, back to the Paris RER and the metro, the night stiff and chilly, the air thick with questions that will never be answered. There is anger, but only a little, and there is sadness, but only a little. Rather, the overwhelming sensation in these earliest twitches of aftermath is a kind of bewilderment, the yawning void where a World Cup semi-final was supposed to be. As if it all feels too abrupt. As if somewhere, on some plane, a sacred pact has been reneged on.
If not now, when? Perhaps this is the question that will consume Caelan Doris in his quieter moments, as he sees the high ball going up with 72 minutes on the clock, a catch he could make in his sleep that will now keep him awake. Perhaps this is the question that Johnny Sexton will ponder when he revisits the penalty kick that he pulled wide of the posts in the second half. Perhaps Conor Murray will see the blur of Jordie Barrett out of the corner of his eye, feel the ghost of an interfering arm extending outwards from his shoulder, and try desperately and forlornly to withdraw it.
If it feels harsh or cruel to pick these isolated fragments of time out of the ashes of four years, then frankly how else to explain what happened? Certainly you can’t fault the process that brought Ireland to the summit of the world rankings, or quibble with the journey that brought them to the brink of immortality. For four years Ireland’s players and staff have done virtually everything right, ticked every box, vaulted every hurdle, screamed down every doubt. Result: another World Cup quarter-final. Put it in the box with the others.
Still, this was one of those defeats that casts everything that went before it into a different kind of light. Were Ireland really favourites in this game? Were they really capable of being world champions in the first place? Did they know, or did they merely believe? Posterity may remember this team with fondness, will reel off those 17 consecutive wins, will lyricise the fluency and vision of Andy Farrell’s men, but the prevailing sensation will always be the last.
At which point, and a little belatedly, we should probably talk about New Zealand, a team that more than any other in world rugby knows how to reverse-engineer the process from the result. Maybe it was pure coincidence that Sam Cane produced one of the performances of his life in one of the games of his life. Ardie Savea may have been better still, perhaps the defining influence on this game, scything and foraging and scrambling and barrelling over the gain-line with green shirts bouncing off him like raindrops. Sam Whitelock waited patiently on the bench for an hour, then bided his time through 37 phases of Ireland pressure, and finally produced the steal that won the game. When the seconds are ticking and the heart is pounding, these are the sorts of players who you want at the wheel.
But to focus on individuals is to ignore the way New Zealand collectively thought this game out, evolved and grew into it, gradually probing for pressure points. They attacked the lineout, sealed off the inside channels, forced Ireland to fling Hollywood passes out wide and then backed their organisation and recovery speed. Beauden Barrett had some early success with the chip-and-chase and so New Zealand doubled down on the tactic, attacking the spaces behind the Ireland defensive line and forcing them back time and again. Plans and schemes only get you so far here. A lot of the time this is simply world-class players adapting on the fly, under the highest conceivable pressure.
And perhaps there is a kind of institutional memory at work here, a rich database of solutions that takes decades rather than years to build up. Mentality is always an easy get-out, but in the rarefied air of a tournament knockout between two ferociously well-matched sides, is it not vaguely relevant that one team have climbed this mountain before and the other have not? This is an Ireland side that have tried and largely succeeded in shaking off the baggage of their predecessors. But in their failure here, they have made the task of the next guys even harder still.
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In any case, what now for this team? Certainly there will be the familiar carousel and retirements and retrenchments. Sexton is gone now. Peter O’Mahony and Bundee Aki will be 37 by the time of the next World Cup in 2027. Tadhg Beirne and James Lowe will be 35. Tadhg Furlong will be 34. There is a new generation coming through, but this machine will have to be remade and refashioned for whatever comes next, and this is a process with precious few guarantees. If not now, when? There’s a fairly simple answer to that question. But it’s not one anyone in Ireland will want to contemplate right now.
