Ireland vs Argentina RWC 2015: No Johnny Sexton but Joe Schmidt steps up to inspire a nation

The slightly built man with the wispy grey hair who took Irish citizenship in a Dublin court in September, declaring his “loyalty to the state” in front of the green, white and orange tricolour, may not have looked like a rugby leviathan, but appearances can be deceptive. “Bring with you your songs, your music, your stories,” implored the presiding officer, Bryan McMahon, a retired Judge of the Irish High Court, “but above all, bring your rugby skills.”

He was speaking to Joe Schmidt, the former English teacher from New Zealand, who has become one of the sport’s most admired coaches, and today carries Ireland’s bid to qualify for their first World Cup semi-final in his delicate hands.

Ireland are the reigning Six Nations champions, having won the title in both seasons Schmidt has been in charge. But they will take on Argentina in Cardiff at lunchtime bereft of five first-choice players. Sean O’Brien is suspended and Paul O’Connell, Johnny Sexton, Peter O’Mahony and Jared Payne are injured. Sexton, one of the world’s top fly-halves, succumbed yesterday to the groin strain he suffered in the win over France last week. Ian Madigan will start instead.

Schmidt, who turned 50 in September, will tell you he has been planning for this challenge since he landed the Ireland job in 2013, with Sexton and Brian O’Driscoll, with whom he had been working at Leinster, his influential supporters. Schmidt set his goal as creating an Ireland squad “of 30 to 35 players, where one can replace another seamlessly, without any weakness to the overall team”.

That goal faces its biggest test against Argentina, when defeat would add to Ireland’s failures at the World Cups of 2003, 2007 and 2011, when even the great O’Driscoll was unable to alter history, despite a Grand Slam in 2009 and Triple Crowns won in between.

The deeper truth is that Schmidt’s trail to this moment leads back to the late 1980s, when he was an amateur playing on the wing for Manawatu. Or further, to the five-year-old who tagged along with his dad, David, a volunteer coach and referee, to their local club in Woodville in the middle of New Zealand’s north island.

Schmidt the player was no All Black. His highlight was scoring a try for Manawatu against France when they were on tour. (Though, typically, Schmidt, the coach, later blamed the French Test wing Jean-Baptiste Lafond while watching the try back for Irish TV. “Poor defending by Lafond, if he’d positioned himself correctly, I’d never have got close.”)

Schmidt grew up before rugby turned professional and went into teaching, but rugby was never far from his thoughts. When he went to work at Palmerston North Boys’ High School, its principal, Dave Syms, spotted his leadership potential and more or less forced him to coach the first XV. “I’d get a video of every game,” Schmidt recalled, “and go into the editing suite at school on Sunday evenings and show the players footage on Monday.”

Again, there would be a later echo of this from the Leinster wing Isa Nacewa. “We were scared of his review sessions on a Monday morning,” Nacewa said, “because he’d pick everything out and put it up there for everyone to see.

“You might have been walking off the ball –with the play up the other end of the pitch – but he would see it.”

Like many New Zealanders, Schmidt and his wife, Kellie, set off to see the world in their twenties and on their travels experienced life in Mullingar, in the middle of Ireland. “I had my first taste of Guinness and it sort of kicked on from there,” Schmidt said. Returning home, he combined a successful teaching career with part-time rugby coaching, but at the age of 37 became a professional coach, invited by Vern Cotter, a hard-nut forwards expert three years his senior, to join him at Bay of Plenty. Their unfashionable team won the Ranfurly Shield. “Nobody is more competitive or has a harder edge,” Cotter, now Scotland’s head coach, has said. “He’s a smiling assassin.”

Schmidt had a trophyless run, continuing to learn the ropes, as an assistant to Peter Sloane and David Nucifora at Auckland Blues, before he again hooked up with Cotter, at Clermont Auvergne in the middle of France. They won the league, ending a barren run.

Always the assistant, always the man in the middle? Leinster provided the transformation. Schmidt became head coach on Nacewa’s recommendation, in 2010. Heineken Cup titles followed in 2011 and 2012.

The 2011 Cardiff final, when Leinster won 33-22 after trailing Northampton by 14 points at half-time, was a comeback for the ages. Schmidt recalled the No 8 Jamie Heaslip’s interval contribution: “It was 20 or 22 or 24 words long, and I know it was an even number because every second word was the same.” Schmidt himself rarely swears, according to his players. But he does inspire them. According to the then Leinster captain Leo Cullen’s autobiography, Schmidt sent the players out for the second half with the message: “When we come back from this, it’ll be folklore.” The prediction was accurate, but the rapid analysis Schmidt had coaxed from his scrum-coach Greg Feek was just as important.

Bernard Jackman, the former Leinster and Ireland hooker, praises Schmidt’s encyclopaedic knowledge of his own players and the opposition. Alan Quinlan, the former Munster and Ireland flanker, points to Schmidt’s regular involvement on the training field, where other managers such as England’s Stuart Lancaster stand back. There is no doubt that in the frenzied, sometimes brutal, world of top-level rugby, Schmidt is a cultured, even cerebral, figure. He had an unusual sideline reviewing novels for an Irish newspaper, and reads thrillers by the likes of David Baldacci. He asks his players to shake hands when they meet for the first time each day.

And his players love him, most notably O’Driscoll – the icon of the modern game in Ireland. “He’s a player’s coach,” O’Driscoll wrote in his autobiography, explaining that he brought, “new ideas, new plays, subtleties that demand absolute attention to detail. The level of detail is like nothing we’ve seen before.”

Schmidt has said. “I have a love-hate relationship with my job. I really enjoy so many elements of it, and at the same time, when the pressure is there, you’re trying to be the least reactive you can be, because if you’re not calm you can’t expect your players to be calm.” These days he brings to the job the emotional intelligence of a much-travelled family man with four children, the youngest of whom, 12-year-old Luke, has undergone brain surgery to treat his epilepsy. Joe has been known to donate after-dinner-speaking fees to an epilepsy charity.

Abby and Tim are at university in New Zealand and Ireland respectively, and Ella and Luke are at school in Dublin. Their father admits he is sometimes late to bed, as he pores over solutions to rugby problems yet to be faced. No one could question his grit as he sat, uncomplainingly, through the win over Australia last November, knowing he’d be having his appendix out that evening.

Ireland raised doubts when they lost two of their summer warm-up matches, but they have beaten Canada, Romania, Italy and, impressively, France in this World Cup. “I’ve committed five years of my life to working hard to help players realise their potential and to learn from those players how much potential they have,” Schmidt said. “I guess the squad have demonstrated they can respond in adversity. There’s something in the Irish psyche that if you are beaten around, there’s a resilience and resolve that gets demonstrated.”

The French rugby newspaper Midi Olympique reported on Friday that Schmidt would be top of England’s wish-list if they seek a new head coach. Unlike the contracts of Lancaster and Wales’s Gatland, which run up to the 2019 World Cup, Schmidt’s was extended in the summer only to 30 June, 2017. The terms of his Irish naturalisation state: “You must intend in good faith to continue to reside in the State”. If Ireland win today, and give themselves the chance of lifting the World Cup, they will surely ask Schmidt to honour his pledge.