It could have been the World Cup final, but France and Ireland are just going to have to settle for the opening match of the Six Nations. The parts they played in a weekend in Paris in October helped raise the Rugby World Cup to heights it would not reach again, coaxing from the actual finalists levels of performance they would not reach again, either.
Little consolation that it was not enough, but when on Friday night France and Ireland meet in Marseille, the other city to host World Cup quarter-finals (and there were other quarter-finals that weekend – look them up), rugby connoisseurs the world over will be fixated. And yet there is enough different about both teams, as there is about this entire Six Nations, to render any considerations of past performance even more obsolete than usual.
Only Italy go into this championship with the same captain that guided them through the World Cup – and they have a new coach. Ireland and France are without familiar captains, who happen to be two of the best players of modern times, but it is the former who are facing up to the greater uncertainty.
There is nothing obviously uncertain about the man to replace Johnny Sexton. All the same, Peter O’Mahony assumes a role he may have been born for without even knowing if he will have a job by the end of this season, such is the apparent mix-up between his union and province over the question of his contract extension.
There was probably a temptation for Andy Farrell, who will be stepping aside next season, albeit temporarily to oversee the British & Irish Lions tour to Australia in 2025, to opt for a bold pick for Ireland’s new captain, something for the future. Perhaps Farrell is all too aware of his own impending absence. Instead, he has turned to O’Mahony, a 34-year-old back-row forward from Munster – in other words, very much how an Ireland captain should be.
Frankie Sheahan, the former Munster and Ireland hooker, has known O’Mahony since he was a boy living over the road in a suburb of Cork, a road he would regularly cross to cut Sheahan’s lawn and absorb the wisdom of the international rugby player he had his sights set on being even back then. Sheahan is heartened by the back-to-basics feel of an appointment such as O’Mahony’s.
“I would be slow to have a captain at out-half,” he says. “Peter O’Mahony being captain is a very good thing. He’s right up there near the referee, he’s experienced, he knows how to play the refs, tell them what they’re doing well or not well.
“The odd critic might say: ‘Why bring a fellow of Peter’s age in?’ but Ireland have not been able to get past the quarter-finals of a World Cup, so why not enjoy the few years in between? This building for a World Cup … what’s the point? If you can’t get past a quarter-final why not try and win everything in between?”
Farrell and O’Mahony have remained coy on Ireland’s targets this Six Nations, other than to trot out the usual about wanting to win every game. They caveat this heavily with the equally common observation that winning every game is a very hard feat to pull off. Such lines of reasoning gloss over the fact that grand slams are more common than their lack. In the Six Nations era, there have been 13 of them (three won by the holders, Ireland) with 11 championships not featuring a clean sweep.
This is testament to the Six Nations’ status as the ultimate competition of momentum. Which means an awful lot hangs on a team’s early games. Ireland will look at this somewhat unconventional opening fixture, in an unfamiliar stadium on a Friday night, and think it could be there for the taking. Especially when France are missing their own talisman in Antoine Dupont, while a player of O’Mahony’s stature steps forward for the coin toss. Win there and the momentum very definitely would be in Ireland’s favour, with home fixtures to follow against Italy and Wales.
If living for the moment is Ireland’s creed, O’Mahony could just be an inspired choice as captain. He admits he had his doubts about carrying on after that most numbing of quarter-final defeats by New Zealand in Paris. He has laid aside his Munster captaincy after so many years as keeper of the flame there. But his wildness of eye in the heat of competition speaks loudly of passion, while regular social media updates on his immaculately kept garden at home reveal a nurturing soul and eye for detail.
“He was always a sponge,” says Sheahan, who could be considered influential in O’Mahony’s rugby and gardening careers. “He was always captaincy material. When he’s on a team, he’s going to be the leader, whether he’s named captain or not. He’s a born leader.”
Just the man, then, to lead Ireland into a post-Sexton future and the World Cup final that never was.
