While we haven't seen Ireland kick a ball in their Rugby World Cup preparations, it's becoming pretty clear that their summer camp has been a break from the past.
In recent weeks Iain Henderson described what's been a "more progressive" pre-season campaign under Andy Farrell in comparison to his previous World Cup experiences, while Robbie Henshaw also spoke of how the rugby ball has featured far more in their conditioning sessions early in the pre-season block.
It seems other lessons from 2019 have also been learned. After this Saturday's meeting with Italy at the Aviva Stadium (live on RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player) Andy Farrell's side will head for a week's training at their home-away-from-home at Quinta do Lago in Portugal, just as they did before the Six Nations earlier this year.
Four years ago The Campus was also the venue of a pre-World Cup trip for the Irish squad, who flew straight from a gruelling week in Portugal to London, where they were jelly-legged on a sweltering day and given a record 57-15 hammering by England as alarms rang around Ireland's prospects. This time round, Farrell's side will take the weekend off after being put through their paces on the Algarve.
For 22 of the 42 players in the training squad, a pre-season World Cup camp is new territory. Word of 2019 seems to have spread like a cautionary tale.
"I think the lads were talking about the 2019 World Cup campaign, it was absolutely barbaric so this has been very enjoyable," said Craig Casey (below), one of those involved in his first World Cup campaign.
"We've kind of mixed the craic with really hard work, doing a lot of rugby skills, a lot of rugby sessions, so it's been brilliant."
As Paul O'Connell explains, the science around what's needed in a pre-season has changed dramatically from his own playing days.
When once the logic dictated that players would work on fitness and then work on skills, the modern thinking has them working in both at the same time.
"In the early days it was all running," the Ireland forwards coach said.
"You can run yourself into the ground, it's actually easy to do. You don’t have to think about anything, you don’t have to think about the defence in front of you, or the attacking shape, or the lineout you’ve to call in 20 seconds. It’s actually easy to mindnumbingly run yourself into the ground and that’s what it was.
"Then it went to conditioning games because we wanted to get the ball in our hands a little bit more. Now, for us anyway, it’s down to, I suppose, trying to play our games, with various constraints in it that makes it a little bit fun, or makes it harder, or makes it easier, for you to break or defend. I’d say that the way most teams have gone."
These days the conditioning is incorporated into the rugby training, rather than the other way around. If players have to make rugby decisions under fatigue during games, then it stands to reason that they should be doing the same on the training pitch.
"You’re taking pictures all of the time in rugby. As a defender you’re taking a picture of the attack and as an attacker you’re taking a picture of the defence.
"The more experience and the more practice you get of taking those pictures within your game and your style of doing things, the better you get at it. That’s what we were able to give these guys during the summer, opportunities to build their ability to take pictures and then make the right call on the back of that.
"You have to get the running into them as well and that’s a challenge because if you do ten more runs, you know exactly how much running you’ve done and you know exactly where you’ve been.
"But when you’re playing 15-a-side or whatever in training and there’s been a few balls put down or whatever, or there’s a little bit of coaching and the intensity can go out of it, that’s the coaching challenge of this type of pre-season," O'Connell added.
Tadhg Beirne was little more than a rookie by Test standards when he was part of the 2019 training squad, with just five caps to his name prior to the warm-up games before Japan.
When asked to reflect on what went wrong in that campaign, the Munster lock pauses for a moment to choose the right words.
"It took a long time to get over it, I'd say. It was fairly disappointing to be honest," he says.
"We had such expectations of ourselves and we probably felt like we didn't fire on all cylinders.
"Overall just disappointment from the get go, even when you talk about warm-ups we didn't particularly play well in them, did we, and that fed into the World Cup in terms of our performances over there.
"I think afterwards it took a long, long time to get over it so I'm certainly hoping that's not the case this year and we'll be doing everything we can to change that."
While the versatile forward played all five of Ireland's games in Japan in 2019, his only two starts were against Samoa and Russia, while he only saw the final quarter of an hour in the opening games against Scotland and Japan.
Four years on, the 31-year-old has become one of Andy Farrell's key men.
"The game has changed a lot as well, in fairness, but I think I've learned an incredible amount over this World Cup cycle off all the coaches that have come in here, they've definitely made me a better player, a smarter player definitely.
"And I probably understand what we're trying to do a lot more than I did in 2019 and that's probably a credit to the coaching staff here and all the players I've played alongside," he added.
Watch live coverage of Ireland's Rugby World Cup warm-up games v Italy (5 August), England (19 August) and Samoa (26 August) live on RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player, listen to live commentary on RTÉ Radio 1 or follow a live blog on RTÉ.ie and the RTÉ News app.
