In November 2018 - after the Irish beat the All Blacks - there was a chorus of people on site that supported the Irish as the team likely to win the 2019 WC. I must admit that I was in the chorus and before the start of the 6-Nations I wrote on site I could not foresee any team beating the Irish this year.
I am afraid that did not work out as envisaged and when the English beat the Irish the chorus switch to England and how they are going to sweep aside all other teams in the process. This time I kept quiet - but noted with concern that new heroes came to the fore that had a rather dubious performance record. However, the craze did not last long and immediately changed when Wale beat England subsequently, There was another sequel though - when the Scots drew with the English yesterday some members started to blame Mitchell alone for the loss and came up with a player who is not eve normally in the Scottish team and only played at 12 because of injuries to their top people aa the new no 12 wonderkid.
Now onto Wales - will it last longer than the English mania lasted, Maybe because there are no official N tests before the WC and Wales may play a number of preparatory games only.
Nobody actually attempted to find out what went wrong with Ireland. I looked at some of their key players and noted a dip in their performances. These players are all well on th eir ay to rugby retirement and some are in fact well past their sell-by date. Is that perhaps not why their was a dip in their performance record this year? .
