{"id":521158,"date":"2026-06-27T12:04:14","date_gmt":"2026-06-27T12:04:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/521158\/"},"modified":"2026-06-27T12:04:14","modified_gmt":"2026-06-27T12:04:14","slug":"stuart-mccloskey-and-tadhg-beirne-both-in-line-to-play-in-irelands-nations-championship-opener-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/521158\/","title":{"rendered":"Stuart McCloskey and Tadhg Beirne both in line to play in Ireland\u2019s Nations Championship opener \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Despite some players missing the end of the domestic season with injuries, the 36-man Ireland<\/a> squad have all been training fully in Sydney ahead of next Saturday\u2019s opening Nations Championship<\/a> game against Australia<\/a> at a sold-out Allianz Stadium.<\/p>\n

This includes Stuart McCloskey and Tadhg Beirne, who have recovered from the torn hamstring and knee injury which cut short their Ulster and Munster campaigns.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone is training and trained hard and trained well today. So, everyone\u2019s fine,\u201d said forwards coach Paul O\u2019Connell<\/a> from the squad\u2019s hotel, not far from Sydney Opera House.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a great hotel, it\u2019s a good location,\u201d added O\u2019Connell. \u201cWe arrived on Tuesday evening. And Wednesday morning, we got the ferry to Manly. We had a nice morning out there. And the weather was beautiful, a lot better than it\u2019s been in the last few days.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, it kicked us off nicely. We have a gym across the road. We\u2019re training in Leichhardt Oval, which is a little bit of a bus drive, but it\u2019s a beautiful training ground. And we\u2019ve been lucky enough with the weather when we\u2019ve trained as well. So, it\u2019s good.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have tomorrow off. I think some of the lads are going to the rugby league this evening. A few lads are going out for dinner. So, yeah, it\u2019s been good. It\u2019s a great city to be touring in.\u201d<\/p>\n

As well as facing the Wallabies, Ireland will also play Japan in Newcastle and New Zealand in Auckland in this inaugural biennial competition. Technically this makes these games \u201ccompetitive\u201d matches per se, although O\u2019Connell maintained it retains much of the feel of the traditional tours.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt feels like a summer tour, really, and I think it\u2019s exciting to have a competition. And we certainly want to be at the business end of it come November. But it feels like a tour and that\u2019s what we\u2019re trying to make it like. I think you learn a lot about each other as a group.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou develop a little bit more on tour because you\u2019re not going home at the weekend. You\u2019re not catching up with your family at the weekend. You\u2019re together all the time. So, we tend to get an awful lot of work done when we\u2019re on tours.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe tend to, I think, take big strides as a team in terms of trying to improve and evolve. So, even though it\u2019s a competition, it feels like, and we\u2019re probably treating it like a tour.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, it all adds to the demands on players at the end of another long hard season, with the Irish squad staying in the same hotel where last summer\u2019s Lions squad were based in Sydney. Only time will tell, but O\u2019Connell believes that the Irish system\u2019s game management will counter any danger of fatigue.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe game minutes aren\u2019t massive with a lot of the lads, actually. Even though a lot of them started quite late. For some of the guys, their first game of the season was against New Zealand in November.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a few guys that have been injury-free all year. They\u2019ll probably have a few more games under their belt than the others. But some guys have picked up knocks throughout the year, which isn\u2019t ideal, but it gives them a little bit of a break.<\/p>\n

\u201cA physical break, but maybe it gives them a mental break as well, because that\u2019s probably the big thing. It isn\u2019t necessarily the games. It\u2019s that the games are all big games that they play these days.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhether they\u2019re internationals, or big European games, or big derby games, or big URC games towards the end of the season, or big games down in South Africa. There\u2019s no soft touches any more, so that\u2019s the challenge for a lot of them.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom my impression of the lads since they\u2019ve come in, the eagerness to work, the eagerness to train, the eagerness to do the work has been great,\u201d added O\u2019Connell.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe trained for the first time yesterday. Sometimes you can judge how things are on the laptop in the afternoon with big numbers of boys sitting together on laptops watching training together, getting realigned.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe enthusiasm is great and I think they\u2019re excited to be away. It\u2019s always a change when you come abroad on tour and you\u2019re in a different hotel, in a different city, in something different. I think they\u2019re in good shape and in good form.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Despite some players missing the end of the domestic season with injuries, the 36-man Ireland squad have all…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":521159,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,1449,86133,43,67195,83298,58217,53328],"class_list":["post-521158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-ireland-rugby","tag-nations-championship","tag-news","tag-paul-o-connell","tag-stuart-mccloskey","tag-tadhg-beirne","tag-wallabies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521158","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=521158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521158\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/521159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}