Your prefered QF

Apologies. If I was to be accurate, I should have said, Ireland are on an upward trend, except when it matters most, where we've actually been getting worse.

Another quality contribution. I will leave you to it so.

Any other side ranked #1, on a 13 win streak, grand slam winners with a test series win in NZ last year would be hot favourites for this RWC. So why are we 4th favourites? Well, because of our history at the tournament and because of our stuttering form in our last 4 games.

Now some people will say the 3 warm ups "don't matter" but these same posters point to NZ's warm up loss to South Africa as proof that they're in trouble.

Our history matters more than warm up form though. As Steve Hansen said 4 years ago when we beat NZ and hit world #1, Ireland has experience at world cups, experience of flopping. It's very very difficult to reverse that trend, just look at Mayo trying to win an All Ireland. Liverpool couldn't buy a Premier League win for decades and they play it every year, not every 4.

History matters, it's why so many on here are confident of us beating a Scotland side that rarely beats us. We can't pick and choose when we want to look to history. If we take comfort from our record against Scotland then we have to face the reality of our woeful record at world cups.

We can’t pick and choose what we look at. But yet you have done exactly that in this post by comparing Irelands uninspiring wins a month out from a meaningful game to NZs record loss 2 weeks from their biggest pool game. You’ve ignored that Ireland have a body of work to fall back on that shows serious class and gives genuine reason to believe they’ll improve as well as the fact that NZ have only just righted their ship ahead of that record defeat.

No one single thing tells us everything. Each game and series of games needs to contextualised within the wider picture. The last 4 games for example is a completely arbitrary number of games to look back on. It is neither the total number of games we played in our last block nor a logical “other” grouping outside of being one that suits a narrative. Go back just 1 more game and we have Ireland away to a supposedly improving Scotland who were vying for the Championship, suffering a number of injuries in the pack causing serious disruption and winning comfortably.

Ireland played 1 game with a near full strength team in the warm ups. Just 1. The other 3 big sides have fielded their first string team numerous times over the course of the warm-ups and the RC (in the case of NZ and SA). They all need to be hitting the ground at full pelt in the pools. We do not.

Also, comparing our history at RWCs to Scotland history against us is incredibly disingenuous. Scotland haven’t been breaking through ceilings leading to a win over Ireland in anywhere near the manner in which Ireland have been leading to a QF win. Again, isolated facts and data won’t tell you the whole story.

We may well lose a QF again this year. The reality is that 3 of the top 5 teams in the world will be gone before the SF. Not might be gone, will be. That could be us as easily as it could be NZ or France. That by itself doesn’t constitute a choke. If we perform and are beaten by a better team on the day then that’s just sport. If we fail to perform then we can talk about choking.