Andy Farrell, the Ireland head coach asked to rebuild the side he made the world’s best

Andy Farrell

Photo: RTÉ Sport / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 30, 1975 Wigan
Occupation	Rugby League Player
Honours	Challenge Cup · Six Nations Championship ×2 · British and Irish Lions series
Individual awards	Officer of the Order of the British Empire

Andy Farrell’s Ireland learned to win the matches that used to beat them. They won in Dunedin and again in Wellington, took a Grand Slam in Dublin, and then he borrowed the best players of four nations and brought the British & Irish Lions home from Australia with a series. The question waiting for him this month is a harder one. His Nations Championship squad is without its regular captain Caelan Doris, the summer ended with a heavy defeat at Eden Park, and the Irish union has just tied him to the job through the next two World Cups. The IRFU is trusting the man who built the last great Irish side to work out whether it needs taking apart.

He is a Wigan man, a rugby league man first, and the son of a league player. Graeme West, then captain of Wigan, ran the summer camp where he first picked up the oval ball as a boy, and the local amateur club Orrell St James did the rest. He was still sixteen when Wigan gave him a first-team debut against Keighley at Central Park. His son Owen, who would captain England in the other code, was born that same year.

What came next filled a trophy cabinet. Born on 30 May 1975, he became, at 17 years and 11 months, the youngest player to win a Challenge Cup final, made his Great Britain debut against New Zealand at 18, and in 1996, aged 21, became the youngest captain Great Britain had ever had. He won the Man of Steel award in 1996 and again in 2004, the year he also took the Golden Boot as the best player in the world. He married Colleen O’Loughlin, sister of his future Wigan teammate Sean O’Loughlin, in 1995. By the time he left Wigan he had played 370 games for the club, scored 3,135 points, captained England at the 2000 World Cup and been appointed OBE.

The move to rugby union in 2005 was supposed to be the second chapter of the same story. It never got going. A run of injuries and a car crash pushed his Saracens debut back to September 2006, and once he was fit nobody agreed where he should play: his club picked him at flanker while the England management wanted him in the centre. He started at inside centre against South Africa at the 2007 World Cup, scored his only England try against Tonga, and then pulled out of the quarter-final against Australia with a calf injury. Eight caps was the total. He retired in April 2009 and stayed at Saracens as a coach.

The coaching career moved faster than the union playing career ever did. Stuart Lancaster brought him into the England set-up for the 2012 Six Nations, Warren Gatland took him to Australia as defence coach with the 2013 Lions, and when Lancaster resigned in late 2015, Eddie Jones cleared out the whole staff, Farrell included. Ireland hired him as defence coach under Joe Schmidt in 2016, after a few months advising Munster while his England contract ran out, and in November 2018 the IRFU announced he would take over when Schmidt left after the 2019 World Cup.

His first match in charge, against Scotland in February 2020, ended in a 19-12 win; the first two championships ended in third place. The shift came over the following eighteen months. Ireland beat the All Blacks 29-20 in Dublin in November 2021 and then, in July 2022, won a Test in New Zealand for the first time, 23-12 in Dunedin, before taking the series 32-22 in Wellington and climbing to the top of the world rankings. The 2023 Six Nations ended with a Grand Slam sealed against England, World Rugby named him Coach of the Year, and a second straight title followed in 2024.

The Lions job came in January 2024. Simon Easterby ran Ireland during his sabbatical, and Farrell’s squad lost its warm-up to Argentina in Dublin before winning every game in Australia except the last. A 27-19 victory in Brisbane and a 29-26 win in Melbourne settled the series; the 22-12 defeat in Sydney spoiled the clean sweep. It was the Lions’ first series win since 2013, the tour on which Farrell had been an assistant.

That tour also produced the decision he still gets asked about. When Elliot Daly broke his arm, Farrell called up Owen, who had not played for weeks because of injury at Racing 92 and who was a fly-half replacing a utility back. Dan Biggar said the move made no sense; Stuart Barnes called it deluded, and some went further and called it nepotism. Farrell dismissed the criticism as “nonsense” and insisted the whole coaching group had made the call. The bigger doubt is about his Ireland. The 2023 World Cup ended in a 28-24 quarter-final defeat to New Zealand, the round Ireland have never got past, and in the sixteen months up to July 2026 his team lost twice to the All Blacks, twice to France and once to South Africa. Writing in Planet Rugby, Liam Heagney argued that Ireland no longer look like a world-leading side every time they play, and that a coaching group that has barely changed has grown comfortable.

The past year has given both sides of that argument something to work with. Last November brought a 26-13 defeat to New Zealand in Chicago and a 24-13 loss to South Africa in Dublin. The 2026 Six Nations brought a fourth Triple Crown in five years, sealed by a 43-21 win over Scotland, and second place by two points behind France, whose 48-46 win over England on the final day took the title. On 5 June the IRFU extended his contract to the end of the 2031 World Cup in the United States. In July Ireland came from twelve points down to beat Joe Schmidt’s Australia 33-31 in Sydney and beat Japan 36-20 in Newcastle, then went to Eden Park and lost 40-21. Farrell said that scoreline did not reflect how close Ireland are to New Zealand.

November will test that claim. Ireland face Argentina at the Aviva Stadium on 6 November, Fiji on 14 November and South Africa on 21 November, with the Nations Championship finals at Twickenham a week later. Dan Sheehan captains the squad, Doris and Jack Conan are injured, and the uncapped Ulster pair Jamie Benson and James McNabney have been called up. The 2027 World Cup in Australia is a year away, and a quarter-final there is where his Ireland will be judged.

Tags: sports, athletes, Andy Farrell, Wigan Warriors, British & Irish Lions, Ireland national rugby union team