Does every nightmare look worse when juxtaposed with a dream? Of course it does. Let’s start with the latter. The Ireland full-back Hugo Keenan wiped every other contender for the man-of-the-match award with a hat-trick, all sorted before the curtain was lifted on the final quarter. Its backdrop featured an extraordinary time gap – he had not had a run at the Aviva Stadium since the 2025 Six Nations when injury arrived.
“It’s been 21 months since I played here in green,” he said after this six-try Nations Championship win. “It’s been tough watching the lads, so it’s great to be out here, and like the rest of the lads, good to be able to do it justice. They [the tries] were three walk-ins to be honest. I’ll take anything that comes.”
Keenan’s idea of a walk-in is some way removed from what actually unfolded. “We got a bonus-point win against a really tough Argentinian side, beating them by 30 points but not playing to our full potential,” he said. The bit about the Pumas being really tough is a bit loose as well.
For many this game was framed less by the immediate needs of this competition and more by what might unfold in the World Cup in a year’s time. The approach roads to the knockout stages have signposts pointing to a junction between Ireland and Argentina. Given the history of these two countries in World Cups you can understand it is difficult to focus solely on the here and now.
Certainly Felipe Contepomi will try hard to achieve just that, and not let his mind wander. For this second phase of the Nations Championship he has recruited Mario Ledesma and Shaun Edwards to coach a bang average Argentina scrum and a struggling defence respectively. They will not be getting much time off.
Which is exactly the nightmare for Contepomi: he was a key figure in keeping Ireland under the thumb in the 2007 World Cup; he has always dialled into the passion of Argentina and their capacity to cause upset. But they were beaten out the gate here. Turning that around before next year will require a whole programme of magic tricks in the absence of a raft of new and better players.
They got off to a flyer before being shot to ribbons. The Pumas made a case for their ability to react to whatever was thrown at them, with Mateo Carreras their advocate in chief. The game was only 11 minutes old when he sent an urgent message to his teammates that their hosts had left the back door unlocked and the diminutive Craig Casey standing guard. It was not so much an aerial contest to gather Tomás Albornoz’s crosskick as Carreras casually reaching a shelf Casey had only heard of. Madness.
The same Puma scored again in the second half but that would constitute the sum of Argentina’s work. All the other bits and pieces belonged to the home side who would hardly claim perfection, but if the adage about beating what is put in front of you was a metric then they hit the jackpot.
“We can double down now on a great victory and see how we can improve and how we can get better, and our new standards, and all that,” Andy Farrell said after. “It’s a good place to be. We dominated on territory but our ability to be able to convert wasn’t where it needs to be at times.”
If Keenan was the undisputed man of the match then Sam Prendergast was another to leave the field well pleased. At half-time Farrell would have urged his team to close the deal in the third quarter, being 21-5 in front. Given the way Argentina were falling apart in the last 10 minutes of the half, between injury and a yellow card, it should have been a greater gap.
So Prendergast – and the coach who has stood by him – will have been delighted that the fly-half’s game-settling score came through a clean break finished with a turn of speed rarely seen in his career to date.
Rónan Kelleher got in on the act with a try, leaving a lot of time for Contepomi to be looking at his watch and willing it all to be over. They have more pain to come.
