Unrelenting quest for perfection puts Ireland boss in league of his own – with Michael Cheika second<\/p>\n
When Joe Schmidt took over as coach of the national side, Ireland were in ninth position in the IRB world rankings. A precarious position – Ireland were out of the top eight seeded teams.<\/p>\n
Ireland would have gone up to third if JP Pietersen hadn’t scored in the last minute of Saturday’s game – somebody might pay for that indiscretion yet.<\/p>\n
Winning matches validates Schmidt’s coaching credentials and orchestrating a good, old-fashioned mugging would certainly be pleasing to all of the back-room staff, but the fact that the late try by the Springboks came as it did. . . it was made known to all that it displeased the head coach. He doesn’t say these things for show……….. see more at :- http:\/\/www.independent.ie\/sport\/rugby\/autumn-internationals\/neil-francis-ruthless-schmidt-out-in-front-as-best-coach-in-the-world-30740840.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Unrelenting quest for perfection puts Ireland boss in league of his own – with Michael Cheika second When Joe Schmidt took over as coach of the national side, Ireland were in ninth position in the IRB world rankings. A precarious position – Ireland were out of the top eight seeded teams. Ireland would have gone […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[5687,4592,14520,6358,10070,12126],"class_list":["post-76144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ulster-rugby","tag-best","tag-coach","tag-francis","tag-neil","tag-ruthless","tag-schmidt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intouchrugby.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intouchrugby.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intouchrugby.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intouchrugby.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intouchrugby.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76144"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.intouchrugby.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":638097,"href":"https:\/\/www.intouchrugby.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76144\/revisions\/638097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intouchrugby.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intouchrugby.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intouchrugby.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}