When The Irish Rugby World Cup 2027 Came So Close

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It is almost that time of year again. The season of mince pies, Rugby World Cup 2027, a small glass of cognac, and the quiet ritual of waiting for Father Christmas. You leave the treats carefully by the chimney, turn out the light, and drift off to sleep. If fortune smiles, you might half-hear the familiar thud and wheeze as Santa Claus squeezes down the flue with his sack of gifts.

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If you are luckier still, he may leave behind a fine rugby book beneath the tree. You could do far worse than waking on a cold Christmas morning to find Brendan Fanning’s Touching Distance: Irish rugby’s great battle with expectations waiting for you. It is the kind of book that draws you in, warms the heart with humour and story, and keeps you turning pages long after breakfast.

Yet there is a warning ...
... attached, tucked away quietly rather than printed in bold. This book is written with full knowledge of what might have been, but never was. That knowledge hangs over every chapter. For supporters of the Irish Rugby World Cup 2027, it creates an uneasy feeling that lingers, a dull ache in the stomach that no festive remedy can cure. The stories delight, but they also sting.

Touching distance means exactly what it says. It means reaching a Rugby World Cup quarter-final as the number one team in the world. It means beating the reigning champions in the pool stage, then meeting a New Zealand side you had defeated the year before on their own soil.

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Rugby World Cup: An Elegy Still Being Written

Then it means losing again, at the same point where Irish campaigns always seem to end. Despite the progress, the professionalism, and the structural reforms beneath the senior team, the result is familiar. They win, and you go home. That is the story of Irish Rugby World Cup over the past decade: a narrative full of charm, intelligence, and personality, but shadowed by frustration.

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Longing for what could have been runs through it like a quiet refrain. Fanning’s book reads almost as an elegy. The last rites may not yet have been delivered, but they are never far away, folded in a pocket as a reminder that success can be both close and cruel. The book truly gathers momentum when it turns to the man who drove Ireland into the top tier of world rugby in the 2010s.

Six chapters focus on the Joe Schmidt era, the heart of the story. Schmidt first arrived in Ireland in 1991, unknown and uncelebrated, landing in Mullingar as a young player from Manawatu who wanted experience and a glimpse of the wider world beyond New Zealand. By the time he left that first time, he was coaching Wilson’s Hospital School and acting as player-coach for Mullingar RFC.

Quietly hinting at what lay ahead. As Fanning notes, Schmidt’s return seventeen years later could be imagined as a Hollywood tale. A modern reworking of a mission to banish old habits and reshape beliefs, perhaps even with a change of name to Patrick.

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Rugby World Cup Final: Built by One, Perfected by Another

This second arrival was anything but low-key. It sparked a cycle of success that began with Leinster in the 2010–11 season and rolled on, almost without interruption, through to 2017–18 with Ireland. The Irish Rugby World Cup Final was transformed, and nothing would be quite the same again. Where his predecessor, Michael Cheika, was a builder of culture, Schmidt was a master of detail, relentlessly pushing standards forward.

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If Cheika laid the foundations, Schmidt refined every measurement. It was a process of preparation and precision, leaving little to chance. Former Leinster flanker Kevin McLaughlin remembers the shock of that change clearly. The squad believed they understood the game, only to realise how much they had missed. Schmidt would issue a short document before every match.

Outlining the opposition’s habits, Ireland’s key plays, and the principles that underpinned everything. They were impossible to ignore. They shaped how players thought, trained, and performed, and they defined an era that came painfully close to delivering everything it promised. We had discussed the possibility of my ghost-writing it over coffee one Saturday morning in Wilde & Green.

A busy restaurant in Milltown near where he lived. It was like pushing a heavy door that hadn’t been opened in years… When we met again, a few months later at the same venue, he said he was thinking about writing the book himself, and maybe I could have an input in some way. Jaysus.

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