McDONALD JONES STADIUM in Newcastle has been announced as the venue for Ireland\u2019s Nations Championship Test match against Japan on Saturday, 11 July.<\/p>\n
Ireland open their southern hemisphere series in the new competition against Australia at Sydney\u2019s Allianz Stadium on Saturday, 4 July, before facing the Brave Blossoms elsewhere in New South Wales a week later [KO 8pm local time, 11am Irish time].<\/p>\n
Andy Farrell\u2019s side then face New Zealand at Auckland\u2019s Eden Park the following Saturday, 18 July, before hosting Argentina, Fiji and South Africa in the northern hemisphere series in November. A finals weekend then follows at Twickenham.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Japan game \u2013 for which they are the hosts \u2013 will be the first neutral Test hosted in Australia since the Covid-19 pandemic and the second rugby international played at McDonald Jones Stadium in as many years after Australia beat Fiji in front of a record crowd of 28,132 last July.<\/p>\n
Home to the\u00a0Newcastle Knights\u00a0and A-League soccer side Newcastle Jets, the venue\u2019s capacity is 33,000.<\/p>\n
Japan-Ireland will immediately follow the Wallabies\u2019 duel with France in Brisbane earlier that evening.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This will be 12th meeting between the sides since the 1991 World Cup, Ireland winning all bar once, at the 2019 tournament. Farrell\u2019s side dominated their most recent encounter, 41-10 at Aviva Stadium last November.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"McDONALD JONES STADIUM in Newcastle has been announced as the venue for Ireland\u2019s Nations Championship Test match against…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":412533,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,181007,86133,43,3654],"class_list":["post-412532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-land-down-under","tag-nations-championship","tag-news","tag-rugby"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412532\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/412533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}