If you were Nucifora this was the difference between motoring on and waiting an age for clearance to leave home. The scale of the job was stupendous. He became one of those white van drivers with ladders on the roof and a legend on the side: ‘Specialists in Everything.’ And everything was listed.

In this case it included overseeing the national team, the provincial teams, the national age-grade teams and women’s team, sport science and medical services for all that lot, and elite referee development.

He would sit on the national PGB and contribute to policy. Then there was contracting, the depth chart succession for players, the coach development programme, along with his involvement on various World Rugby, Six Nations and Rugby Europe groups.

It was crazy stuff. You could see why he liked the idea of reporting to one man. Consider also that the arrival of a performance director was the best news Browne had got since the latest FAI calamity of the day, one from a bounty sent from the public relations gods to keep rugby looking good alongside its basket case tenant in the Aviva.

At last, here was a new arrival who would hoover up all the flak about rugby, which is not really Browne’s first love. Running a tight ship was fine for the CEO, but the nitty gritty of the vessel itself and who would serve on it? Not really his bag. Nuce, welcome aboard.

It would have been impossible for Nucifora to hit all those targets. Some he bulls-eyed, others he grazed, and a few he missed altogether. The only hard and fast riding instructions he was given were about Sevens.

The short game has never been liked, let alone loved, in this country. To develop competence here could lead to the Olympics, and keep Sport Ireland interested, which was important for funding. So crank it up.

Even now, as Ireland’s Sevens squad prepares for the World Rugby Sevens Repechage in Monaco later this month, most Irish rugby fans would struggle to tell you who’s on the team or how they rate. You could counter by pointing to the likes of Will Connors, Hugo Keenan and Robert Baloucoune as players whose careers have benefited from the experience — a stronger argument when Baloucoune soon gets capped by Andy Farrell in the main game.

The reality, however, is that Sevens is not a rich new vein bringing us fresh talent. It’s an inconvenience to the pursuit of the real deal. Schools and clubs are already wed to their long-term, long-game partner, so where is the gush going to come from?

Sevens draws down a few hundred grand from Sport Ireland as part of the annual grant to the IRFU, and holds out the hope of Ireland getting another team in an Olympic Games. Qualifying from Europe for the Olympic Games is a battle.

A quick look at the pools for Repechage this month is sobering. This is the last train to Tokyo, with a ticket only for the winner. Check out the competition: France, for example, have Hong Kong, Chile, Uganda and Jamaica to deal with. Ireland have been lumped with Tonga, Samoa, Zimbabwe and Mexico. How lucky were France with that one?

When it came to the highest-profile stuff — the men’s international side — Nucifora was blessed to inherit Joe Schmidt as coach.

Schmidt was already up to the speed of Test rugby when the Performance Director pulled into the car park. By the time Schmidt was running out of gas, Ireland had tacked on another Six Nations, a Grand Slam and a first win over New Zealand, repeating the trick in 2018 — a 12-month period in which it was hard to cram in all the good stuff.

A year later the story was of the long, slow car crash that was 2019, finishing with another major target — the last four of a World Cup — passing by for the second time on Nucifora’s watch. Schmidt carried the can.

In fairness, Nucifora doesn’t coach the side. He does, however, wield extraordinary power in how the bits and pieces are put together.

With the IRFU’s PGB tucked away in his pocket he decides what players should be on central contracts, who should be hired and who should be fired in a range of jobs at a variety of levels. You’d want the skills of a circus juggler to keep all those balls in the air.

So when the big top comes to town, and we’re offered a ticket, you’d be mad to turn it down. Last week we were seated remotely, part of a gaggle of hacks, staring into the screen waiting for the maestro to appear.

Straight away he found his stride, chucking the words “alignment of purpose” out there and watching them float across the ether. You wondered if he was having a laugh. Coming on the heels of the fiasco where women’s coach Adam Griggs, speaking after a monumental spanking by France in April, revealed a system with all the alignment of a warped wheel, this was quite an intro.

Griggs, in a nutshell, had said he didn’t know who in the IRFU was running the domestic game, which produces players for his women’s team. You couldn’t make it up. The IRFU’s damage limitation plan only added to the mess.

Never mind, this remote forum doesn’t allow for any theme to be challenged so Nucifora cracked on. Soon he ticked the coaching box, which was high on his agenda. Cue a lengthy monologue which laid a few garlands at the feet of Matt Wilkie, the former head of coach development at the union.

This was a cunning response to the questions asked in these pages last Sunday about Wilkie’s impact on the coaching scene here.

Nucifora made him sound like a cross between Carwyn James and Bill Belichick. This may all be true, but it’s odd that Nucifora chose three days after the Sunday Independent article to deliver his oration rather than last November, when Wilkie went back home to Australia.

The IRFU made no public comment at the time of Wilkie’s departure, or that he would continue to be paid as a consultant.

Interestingly, it was on Wilkie’s watch that coaching took a major strategic turn here with the abandonment of Stage 5 courses — the top of the tree in the system set-up many years ago by Stephen Aboud, who consulted widely on its content.

It opened the door to coaching at the professional level. So if you were an All Ireland League coach with ambition, then Stage 5 was clear on your radar.

It is understood there was talk of revamping it into a different form, but it never happened. “Effectively the process for coaches (at that level) moved to Matt working as a mentor rather than having a particular course,” said a man familiar with the decision. Okay. With the mentor back in Australia, and no course to follow, what would you say to aspiring coaches who want to make a career of it here?

It’s easy to see why those same coaches would feel cut off in a system where David Nucifora values “alignment of purpose” but doesn’t explain its manifest disconnection.

Would he say our production of international referees has kept pace with a tradition of punching above our weight? Would he say the professional game is fed by a system that competes tooth and nail with the GAA to hoover up the raft of talent in this country? Would he say the transfer of players around the provinces — which he worked hard to encourage given it would reduce the trend towards non-Ireland-qualified operators — is running anywhere near optimum?

Maybe, with a year left on his contract, he would accept that the scale of his brief is, as the match commentators like to say, going coast to coast. There is a lesson in that for the IRFU. Seven years ago they whacked out a six-figure sum on an executive search that yielded Nucifora as the winner. In a year’s time they should be looking for two people to do the job, and seeing if they can tie-in the performance of the domestic game.

They could include in the job spec a bit about building relationships with interested parties. We spoke to a raft of people across the game here last week and it was hard to find any positivity about the IRFU’s Performance Director.

It is impossible to wade into the number of battles in Nucifora’s war without causing casualties. Fair enough. This doesn’t mean you have to napalm everything that pops into your line of fire.