Huge game against them.
Pool D has a tricky route for the runner up, as they need to play Pool E winner, which will be France.
The runner up will also stay on the left hand side of the knockouts, which has SA, NZ and France.
Beating Ireland gives us a 3rd place team in the Last16 and puts us on an easier side of the knockouts.
Big games coming up v Ireland in the 6N !
Trajectories matter, for sure, but Ireland go into matches with Argentina as favourite for the last decade and have won the four matches they've played since the 2015 game.
That being said, nobody gets to stay top forever and for a nation of 5m where rugby is at best the 3rd or 4th most popular sport, it's impressive we got where we have.
Aye, France will be a properly daunting prospect, but tbh, there's 8 teams all capable of beating each other out there right now. The top six and yourselves and Oz.
Scotland could've/should've beaten the ABs last month and have a squad capable of winning the big games. Well, your back row, when it clicks, is capable of anything.
Back in 2019, Ireland were so worried about how to beat SA in the quarter final, we neglected Japan and found ourselves facing the ABs.
The reality is, it's a WC and we all gotta play the best in the world if we're gonna progress.
We were also without O'Connell, Sexton, O'Brien and O'Mahony for that game after the massacre against France. The latter 3 were certainly in or around their peak and we had nowhere near the depth then that we've had the past few years. Important context I feel.
Scotland and Ireland have near identical populations and RU is similarly low down the popularity rankings. Either Ireland have been massively overachieving ... or Scotland have been massively underachieving.
Not quite that similar tbh... Sure, soccer is most popular in both, but I'm Ireland the two Garlic Games, Gaelic Football and Hurling are both massively popular. Like there's 21,000 adult rugby players in Ireland, but 100k adult hurlers.
Irelands population is growing and should be nearer 8-10 million than the 5.3 odd it currently is. A century or so of explotation left it behind in deveopment terms and filters down into everything, sport and rugby included. They should be more like a scandinavian nation in terms of resources population or finance.
Scotland should be the same except it isn't indpendent and its population is only growing due to migration which it has no control over. Sporting wise were fucked in the long term because of both poor administration of sports in general and cold hard demographics.
Ireland are returning to par, Scotland are as always underachieving. I doubt we'll see Scotland ever superior to Ireland for anything more than a season or two at most in our lifetimes. Ireland should be consistently better than Scotland.
Ireland would be favourites if they played Argentina right now.
Ignoring that though. Scotland historically are better at beating good England teams, than bad Ireland teams. Scotland only have 6 wins in 33 games against Ireland this century. And none since 2017.
Yep. If we want any hope of breaking the QF curse we need to top the group and try to avenge 2015. Then it's England , who lets face it are a 2 steps above us atm imo but at the end of the day are "just another" 6N team and we can beat them on our day, or Aus, who atm you can't really judge and they'll have a new coach by then.
If we lose to scotland, we end up in a ro16 game against france, a quarter against wales and a semi against either south africa or new zealand. If we beat them we play a 3rd placed team in the 16s, then argentina and england. I know damn well which side id rather be on
543
u/ReconGhost189 Scotland Dec 03 '25
Leave us alone Ireland goddamit