Category News

Paul O’Connell has been named Ireland’s interim head coach for the summer tour of Georgia and Portugal after Simon Easterby was appointed to the British and Irish Lions coaching team.

Defence coach Easterby was given the Ireland interim head coach for the recent Six Nations because Andy Farrell is on a sabbatical from the role as he prepares to lead the Lions in Australia.

However, Farrell, as expected, has named Easterby in a Lions coaching team which will also have further Ireland representation in scrum coach John Fogarty and backs coach Andrew Goodman.

This led the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) to confirm later that forwards coach O’Connell, 45, will take charge of the Ireland squad in the Tests against Georgia and Portugal which take place on 5 July and 12 July.

IRFU performance director David Humphreys congratulated Easterby, Fogarty and Goodman on their inclusion in the Lions coaching team.

“It is a huge statement of faith in their skillsets and standing within the wider game, and I have no doubt that they will contribute greatly to a successful Lions tour,” said Humphreys.

“Simon’s appointment means that an opportunity arises for a new interim head coach for the two-match summer tour to Georgia and Portugal and I’m delighted that Paul O’Connell will assume the role for this tour.”

The remainder of the Ireland coaching team for the summer Tests will be announced next week.

The venues and kick-off times for the two games are yet to be confirmed.

Ireland’s tour squad is likely to be considerably understrength with a large contingent of regulars expected to be in contention for Lions selection.

Munster great O’Connell, who won 108 Ireland caps and played on three Lions tours including the 2009 series where he captained the side in South Africa, was appointed Ireland forwards coach in 2021 after Easterby switched to the defence coach role.

In any previous World Cup, there would be genuine fear about Brazil failing to qualify. Not this time.

In an expanded competition, with six South American teams making it through automatically, Brazil have a six-point cushion over a Venezuela team who have just registered their first victory in 10 games.

With four rounds to go, it is impossible to see Brazil not making the cut. But that is hardly the point.

For Brazil, World Cup qualification now serves one purpose – it provides a sequence of competitive matches during which they hope to build a side capable of winning the trophy. And with just over a year to go until 2026, that looks a long way off.

It is easy to forget how good Brazil were in the last World Cup, where they lost in the quarter-finals on penalties to a Croatia team whose only shot on goal in the match took a cruel deflection.

The Qatar 2022 Brazil side were solid – goalkeeper Alisson could have taken a deckchair out for most of the games – with flashes of brilliance. They could have won that competition.

So why have they fallen back so much? How can a team packed with so many good players form such a dismal unit?

Tuesday’s prolonged humiliation did not come out of the blue.

In game after game the team have looked disjointed, without clear strategies for progressing the ball down the field, and suffering from the possibility of being both outplayed and outnumbered in central midfield.

Individual talent has papered over the cracks – like on Thursday, when a stoppage-time Vinicius Jr special gave them a victory over Colombia their play had not really deserved.

But it can’t happen all the time.

And if the film is bad, especially if the cast is impressive, the director must be to blame.

There is a crisis in Brazilian coaching. It is hard to produce coaches when there is no time to train and no job security. That is the reality of domestic Brazilian football, and helps explain why almost all of the successful coaches in the country are now foreign – either Argentine or, especially, Portuguese.

The national boss – for now anyway – Dorival Jr is a product of the domestic game, with more than four decades’ experience as player and coach.

But on the international stage he comes across as a decent man thoroughly out of his depth.

Did he really think he could travel to Argentina and play two men in central midfield? Why not drop deep and create space for the counter-attack, as he did a year ago against England at Wembley? And when cool heads were required, his team came across as a bag of nerves, all too willing to get involved in cheap spats.

Of the three duties of the coach – pick the team, determine the strategy and set the emotional tone – Dorival failed dismally, and it is very hard to see how he can keep his job.

Whoever comes in – or Dorival if he manages to hang on – will have to deal with a simple observation – central midfield is not an optional extra.

It is an area where Brazil have had a problem for a while – a consequence of the 1990s trend of splitting the middle of the park into a pair of midfielders who only defend and a duo who mostly attack. It was at this point Brazilian play lost much of its former fluency, instead investing in rapid breaks down the flanks.

It is in this context that the problems of Lucas Paqueta are so significant.

The West Ham midfielder was on the verge of becoming a big-money Manchester City signing when scandal struck, and his career – now threatened – has not recovered.

The absence of Paqueta almost certainly led to Dorival building his hopes for these international dates around the return of Neymar – which, predictably, turned out to be ludicrously premature.

After so long out injured, it was only to be expected that Neymar would run into muscular problems, and he will need much more time on the field to ease his way back to a level where he can tip the balance.

At 33, he is an unknown quantity. But there is a gaping hole in the team for the type of deep-lying playmaker role he could fill.

Romantics might recall 2002, when Ronaldo looked all washed up only to make a triumphant return from injury and carry a Brazil side that almost failed to qualify all the way to World Cup title number five.

They are still waiting for number six.