Iain Henderson hails ‘incredible plan’ as Ireland prepare for 2023 Rugby World Cup

IAIN HENDERSON believes a more rugby-oriented pre-season can help Ireland break their World Cup hex.

Henderson is preparing for his third tournament after Joe Schmidt’s sides of 2015 and 2019 followed in the long tradition of not progressing beyond the quarter-finals.

The lock claims there is a noticeable difference in preparations for this year’s finals, with Andy Farrell seeking input from players based on past experience.

And it is a case of ‘so far, so good’ as far as the Ulster man is concerned.

He said: “There’s been an incredible plan put in place. The players have been involved in the discussions going back six months about how we wanted pre-season to work, what we wanted to get from it.

“It definitely feels we’re a lot more about rugby.

“I know that sounds silly but there’s a huge emphasis on rugby and being the best rugby team we can, rather than being the best team in the gym or the best team on the pitch.

“Yes, you have to be fit and you have to be strong.

“But we feel like we’ve got a really good balance of doing both of those, not making it the most difficult pre-season physically for the sake of it.

“It feels very different. We’ve started rugby a lot earlier. There was a lot of running in the last World Cup. By running I mean like non-rugby- related conditioning running.

“I feel like we’re getting a lot of our conditioning from a rugby environment. It feels like the squad is in a good place and that if we had to play this weekend we could.”

As it is, the players will have to wait until August 5, when they host Italy, for their first World Cup warm-up.

Four years ago, in their first pre-season outing they suffered a record 57-15 loss to England at Twickenham, with the second row again pointing to the difference in preparations by way of explanation.

He added: “It felt leading into that game that we were fatigued after that Portugal training week.

“It felt like we were off the boil, it felt like we weren’t fit enough. But that was a fair bit out from the World Cup, three or four weeks, that’s a huge amount of time in terms of strength and conditioning.”

So Henderson did not see that as a portent of things to come, as Ireland lost in the pool stage to hosts Ja