Experienced assistant coach Simon Easterby will step up to the Irish head coach job as Andy Farrell takes a sabbatical at the start of 2025
Experienced assistant coach will step up to the job as head coach takes a sabbatical at the start of 2025 before leading the Lions’ tour to Australias in the next couple of weeks in advance of him fulfilling that role on the forthcoming Emerging Ireland tour to South Africa for a second time.
In what has proven to be something of a masterstroke looking back, Easterby was lured on to the Irish coaching ticket in the summer of 2014 as a replacement for John Plumtree. Over a decade later he is still there. Even so, in Easterby’s five championships as defence coach, Ireland conceded the joint-least tries in 2021 and had the best defensive record in each of the last three seasons, conceding just 27 tries in that time overall.
Easterby led the 2022 Emerging Ireland tour to South Africa in Farrell’s absence, when assisted by O’Connell, Ireland scrum coach John Fogarty and the recently departed Mike Catt. The latter will be replaced by the incoming Ireland backs’ coach Andrew Goodman for the Emerging Ireland tour at the end of this month.
In his own low-key and stealthy way, Easterby has built up quite a coaching CV and, while his interim promotion is as inevitable as it is well deserved, to lead Ireland into a Six Nations campaign will constitute quite a milestone for the 49-year-old. Such continuity is both a reflection of, and contributory factor to, Ireland’s much-improved performance on the pitch since the turn of the millennium, and the last three head coaches have all presided over Grand Slam campaigns.
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