Are-ireland-and-leinster-the-biggest-chokers-in-world-rugby ?

Rassie is already in WC mode.

How? He’s picked the oldest, most experienced team available to him for Saturday

SA could lose every game between now and WC and not care.

This just isn’t true. You can’t seriously tell me that Rassie will just shrug and move on in if Ireland win this series, or that if NZ win in Ellis Park, no one will be bothered.

Nope, literally nobody has said this that I have seen

It’s literally in the post above yours.

yes, it is. You read it again

I didn’t imply anything, you inferred something. The difference between those is enormous.

I’m used to people being incredibly negative about Ireland but swallowing the Boks pre match horseshit quite so enthusiastically is a little dispiriting.

Also because SA are chokers.

They don’t have competitive clubs though. Just 3 Super Rugby titles in, what, 25 years?

Their good record is basically limited to RWCs exclusively. Go beyond that and they have failed to deliver, especially given the resources they have at their disposal. In many ways they are polar opposite to us. We’ve been able to deliver pretty consistently at league (12 titles), HEC (6 titles) and 6Ns (6 titles) level over the last 20 years, but failed at the RWC. In that time SA have won 1 URC, 3 SR titles, 2 RCs and 3 RWCs. So their success is massively weighted towards 1 competition.

We’ve won 37% of the trophies available to us over those 20 years. They’ve won just over half that, 20% of the trophies available to them. And a third of those were RWCs. Take out the RWCs and they’ve won just under 15% of the trophies available to them. Look at the RWCs alone and that figure becomes 60%. That highlights the massive disparity between their performances at the RWC compared to outside the RWC.

If Leinster are chokers for noting winning the CC and Ireland are chokers for not winning the 6N then the same applies to SA for not winning the RC.

Do they fail everywhere else because they focus on the RWC, or do they focus on the RWC because they’ve been failing everywhere else?

But looking back over 20 years, their style hasn’t always been exactly what it is now. Hell, we should really be looking back almost 30 years at this stage given the RC and SR have been on the go since 96. Over that entire period they’ve underperformed hugely

Is 30 years of underperformance worth 4 RWCs? I’m sure some would say it is and others say it’s not. But I don’t think I I’d be happy with that return if I were SA. I’d feel we could manage to win RWCs as well as more RCs etc and that the trade off shouldn’t be necessary.

And you see this is the big issue with the WHOOOOOOLE argument here, it's an argument that allows you to twist this and choose when something matters whenever it suits and that is exactly why this argument has no credibility.

I really don’t think you can claim that this Ireland team has underachieved tbh. A series win in NZ and back to back 6Ns titles in 3 years doesn’t back that up. And when you think we went on a winning streak that was 1 game shy of the NZ record then too, it makes it very hard to say that Ireland underachieved.

Leinster over the last 3 years certainly, but I wouldn’t put Ireland in that camp at all.

I'd take 4 world cups.

All major/successful rugby nations measure success on the World Cup. You will see it when you hear ex SH players talk. Ireland (despite having the best team we've ever had), failed to get past the quarter final once again. That is by definition an underachievement. I don't for one second think they bottled the quarter final, far from it, but not progressing is an under achievement. Now I am of the belief that the scheduling of the World Cup massively advantages the Southern Hemisphere teams more, but that's another argument.