Andy Farrell was brutal in his honesty this last week. Could his team board a flight to Australia for next year’s World Cup, he wondered, with a cast-iron belief that the Webb Ellis trophy was gettable?
It was his own question predicated on their recent form, and he owned the answer.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
All going well – and that isn’t something you would ever take for granted with Ireland at any World Cup – they will face Felipe Contepomi’s Pumas in a quarter-final in Brisbane on the last day of October in 2027, so this felt like an opportune test of any grand ambitions.
Argentina did just that early doors, they tested Ireland. The opening try was a delicious and darting blow, out-half Tomas Albornoz popping a pinpoint crosskick over the 5’ 5” Craig Casey and into the breadbasket of Mateo Carreras.
The Pumas kept prowling, sniffing around for openings and finding one or two. That was before Ireland found a grip and began to answer their head coach’s rhetorical question with the most emphatic of answers through three first-half tries.
Now look, Argentina were in dire straits by the break. They had lost their captain Julian Montoya and Leonel Oviedo, his replacement as hooker, to HIAs and outside-centre Justo Piccardo to a yellow card as the pressure mounted.
There was an uncontested scrum at one point.
It was coming close to carnage even before the break, and the toll of a tough year pockmarked by iffy performances and poor results leaked into Argentina’s body language and fed some desultory efforts on the restart.
The other caveat in all this was the space. It was everywhere. Enormous swathes of green grass for both sides to find. This is not the sort of rugby we will see when Rassie Erasmus and his Springboks pitch up here in a fortnight’s time. God, no.
Any structure that had existed in the first-half dissipated more and more as the night wore on and both Farrell and Contepomi went through the usual process of emptying their benches. Punters started flooding out with minutes to go.
Ireland were 30 points to the good, in fairness.
Take all that into account and maybe we should cut away the second 40 minutes entirely, like mould on a slice of bread, and just toast what Ireland did in that opening period when so much of their play was so good against a side yet to fold.
Those early tries, like so much of the handling, were slick. Inventive. Ireland were making ground up front but it was the flow of that backline that really caught the eye as Craig Casey found a fluency and Sam Prendergast knitted the patterns together.
The centre partnership of Stuart McCloskey and Robbie Henshaw anchored everything, Robert Baloucoune and Mack Hansen were living embodiments of Farrell’s wish for messy wingers, and Hugo Keenan was attacking the line and claiming two of his three tries.
It wasn’t just Farrell who needed to see this.
His team’s 2026 form up to this had been patchy at best. Add in the fact that Argentina weren’t the biggest draw, the reality of eye-watering ticket prices and a Friday night kickoff slot and it left plenty of the stadium’s 51,700 bucket seats untroubled.
Getting into Dublin for Friday night games would test your faith in the theory that civilisation moves incessantly forwards. Forget Google Maps. No matter what the route, a motorist can easily feel like Frodo being lured into Shelob’s Lair.
All this matters during a cost-of-living crisis, and with Christmas around the corner. What Ireland produced here should at least shift a few more tickets for next week’s visit of Fiji, and restore some faith in Project RWC27 in the long term.
Fiji will fall in a similar manner if Ireland can replicate what they did here, but then this team has been exemplary in beating sides rated near or below their bracket. It’s the big three of South Africa, New Zealand and France that they’ve struggled with. Badly.
So, not an evening to get giddy about, but that’s not to dismiss it in its entirety.
Ireland have failed to find any sort of stride in the opening game of recent windows. They have fallen flat twice in recent times against the All Blacks, in Chicago and in Dublin, suffered a spanking in Paris and stuttered over the line against Australia in Sydney.
They needed a strong kick out of the blocks here and they got it. It sets them up for the rest of the month and keeps alive the possibility of topping the Northern Hemisphere table in this new competition and, with that, a final slot in Twickenham at the end of it.
Add in the opportunities handed out to the likes of Craig Casey, Sean Jansen, Nick Timoney and Sam Illo and Farrell has plenty to pore over on the back of a big win against an opponent they’ll meet on a much bigger stage soon enough.
That’s a decent night’s work.