Gerry Thornley On Rugby:Early days yet, but taken in the context of Warren Gatland's stunning first game as Welsh coach, Marc Lievremont's liberation of Les Bleusand the Nick Mallett's initial impact with Italy, the three new brooms have swept away some of the old cobwebs.
By contrast, it's been an uninspiring opening weekend to the RBS Six Nations for the three regimes still in situ. As Eddie O'Sullivan is wont to say, if you stand still you go backwards. How true.
All three of the new brooms were away from home, yet all three defied the handicap odds comfortably and two won - Wales spectacularly so. Of course new coaches often achieve an immediate lift, just by dint of players responding to fresh voices in the knowledge that this is a gilt-edged opportunity to stake their claims.
Gatland had a similar sort of impact when assuming the reins at short notice with Ireland away to France in 1999. Brian Ashton had distanced himself from the defeat to Scotland at Murrayfield with his immortal line, "I don't know whose game plan that was, but it wasn't mine." France were one leg toward the completion of a second consecutive Grand Slam. Ireland, wooden spoonists the previous year and near the end of the Noughty Nineties, were 16 to 1 outsiders and 33-point underdogs on the handicap. They lost 18-16, Gatland's innovations such as filling the room with goodwill messages from the Irish public generating a feel-good factor within the squad base which had been absent for aeons. They still ended up without a win and another wooden spoon, mind.
The sight of an ashen-faced Ashton watching his team implode - from Jonny Wilkinson down - contrasted sharply with an increasingly giddy Gatland and animated Shaun Edwards.
Filling the team with 13 Ospreys in his starting line-up proved a masterstroke in quickly generating a new-found team spirit. As much as a few clever tactical adjustments at half-time, as striking was the Welsh stickability which enabled them to hang on when an initially rampant England threatened to run away with the match. Put another way, would a Welsh side under Gareth Jenkins have had the spirit to come back from a 19-6 deficit?
France were liberated. They didn't kick the ball once in the first 10 minutes. They played with depth and width, the ball moving seamlessly in front of the body through soft hands. They took quick taps, counter-attacked liberally - with the orange-booted Vincent Clerc and Cedric Heymans seemingly joined at the hip as well as kindred Toulouse spirits - and offloaded in the tackle. Never mind that they had the bounce of the ball for two of those tries. Fortune favoured the ambitious.
Ominously with next Saturday in mind, Clerc - the sinewy, deceptively strong man of the match and regular thorn in Irish sides - poached two of their three tries and they threatened many more. This was after one week together.
The more one looks back on Saturday's game at Croke Park the more the mounting error count clearly betrayed an anxiety in Ireland's play - Girvan Dempsey over-running Geordan Murphy's pass, Marcus Horan's forced and forward offload in the tackle, a surprised John Hayes dropping Eoin Reddan's pass and, out of character, Simon Easterby blatantly playing the ball after the tackle on the ground despite being on a warning.
"Unprofessional" it was called on commentary, and yet Easterby is rightly regarded as the ultimate pro. His actions looked to be the combination of the increasing tension in Ireland's play and his own lack of form in a Llanelli side whose form has disintegrated.
It would be a terrible shame if that was his last act in an Ireland jersey but O'Sullivan's reluctant substitutions one week, especially if carried out before the hour mark, are sometimes a harbinger of changes the following week. Easterby's replacement 10 minutes later by Jamie Heaslip, with Denis Leamy moving to blindside, looks like falling into that category, especially as the pack needs an injection of ball-carrying up front.
Given Rory Best's palpable rustiness and the ball-carrying of Bernard Jackman the argument for his inclusion is also strong. Besides, if there are issues about his throwing too, having Best in reserve would be an insurance policy of sorts.
True to type, and to employers who pay lip service to the notion of "four-year cycles", O'Sullivan will be reluctant to "change". Buzz word though it is in the American caucuses, clearly the IRFU and O'Sullivan would not be disciples of Barack Obama's philosophy.
Therefore, it would be no surprise if the only other change will be the enforced one in light of Gordon D'Arcy's misfortune. Despite the clarion calls for a rejigged outside three including Tommy Bowe, playing Italy at home was a more obvious place to reward Bowe's form this season than Paris away.
O'Sullivan's favoured instinct is to go with what he knows best, and that would be Shane Horgan - even if he has little form to speak of and there are questions about his match fitness. That said, he's come back cold into the Test fold from injuries on previous occasions.
One imagines too the Irish skipper, Brian O'Driscoll, may be keenest on Horgan being recalled to provide his leadership and experience, even though his performance on Friday night suggests he is still rusty after just one game in seven weeks. That would leave the question as to where Horgan and Andrew Trimble would be accommodated, though Friday's game also reaffirmed that wing has long since become Horgan's best position.
It will be interesting to see what Lievremont does. In France, they are heralding the depoliticising of Les Bleus. He has retained faith in the same 22, but there is a slight doubt about one of their driving forces, Jean-Baptiste Elissalde, and the French coach might be tempted to start Nicolas Mas given the troubles in their scrum. Well though Ireland did in this area against the Azzurri's renowned scrum, this is not an area of potency for Ireland.
More than anything though, as O'Sullivan accepted on Sunday, there needs to be improvement in Ireland's lineout, clearing out at ruck time and execution. To which might be added more numbers and a higher work rate in the maul, both defensively and offensively, better depth in attack, much more shape in phased attack, and, somehow, generating a new spirit from within.
Whatever it takes. Something wild.
