Ireland look to storm All Blacks’ Eden Park fortress with top spot in sights

In the perennial struggle between domestic sport and international, more exquisitely poised in rugby than anywhere else, this weekend marks the opening of the latest window for the international game to set out its stall. The merchants mean business, too, if the strength of the teams announced, so often depleted at this time of year, is anything to go by.

If international rugby gets its way, every other year we will see yet another tournament of meaning and intensity crank itself up on this first weekend of July, in a desperate bid to hold off the encroaching power and influence of the domestic game. Only every other year, though, because rugby already somehow crams into its quadrennial calendar a Lions tour and a World Cup, beyond the Six Nations, the Rugby Championship and all the myriad domestic duties your average international rugby player has to negotiate.

In between all these, the plan is to crowbar in a biennial tournament of the stars, taking in the 12 major rugby powers, a sort of World Cup, only not called the World Cup, just played relentlessly each year either side of the one that is called the World Cup. Which we think will still be the one that really matters, but who knows by then.

This weekend, though, what feels a more traditional format begins, with teams travelling to the other side of the world for a Test series of meaningful length against one team. All four home unions begin three-Test tours of their respective host nations in the southern hemisphere for what is actually the first time. Could also prove the last.

Most noise will focus, inevitably, on England’s tour of Australia, but the connoisseur’s choice is Ireland’s of New Zealand. Ireland are getting quite used to everyone’s “utmost respect”