SIX NATIONS INTERVIEW DECLAN KIDNEY: GERRY THORNLEYtalks to Ireland's coach about how he and his staff are trying to hone the team's skills set in order to implement their newer game plan
THERE WAS the hiccup of his inaugural autumnal Test series, but this was quickly followed by a Grand Slam. Follow that! Ireland haven’t, and in the course of using 58 players – 23 of them debutants – the 90 per cent winning ratio of his first season has now dipped to 69 per cent. It’s still healthy, but Declan Kidney is, once again, in part becoming a victim of his own success.
It is a results business, and for all the need to broaden both Ireland’s game and player base, he and his coaching staff will be scrutinised more closely and critically this season. But whatever pressure he feels under, he has always masked it well – publicly at any rate. This week in the Stand Hotel in Limerick, he strides through the dining area off the main lobby as unobtrusively as ever, smiling and relaxed.
His readiness with statistics could make him a decent pundit, or at any rate a research assistant, if he was ever of a mind to, which in turn helps him deflect the pressure or, if needs be, reduce expectations. The last match and the next match are all that matters, and the gap in between the last one against Argentina and the next one, in Rome next Saturday, has been nine weeks and counting.
“I miss not having a game every week,” he says wistfully of his schools, club and provincial days, and he means it.
“But then you have the honour of doing this. Like, this season we have nine finals. We’ve had four and another five coming up. Gee, if you can’t enjoy that?” – and he lets the rhetorical question float away.
Being judged against a Grand Slam is just the way it is.
“You’re not going to win every game every year, but if you say that (the Slam was a pedestal to be knocked off) then Pádraig (Harrington) made a mistake winning his three majors. I’m happy that some of the foundation stuff has been done. Ireland will win another championship, Ireland will win another Grand Slam. When? Who knows. Would I like to be around? Of course I would. Any excuse for a party, and you want to represent people very well.
“I can’t say I know, but I have an understanding of what way things are in the country and I take that very seriously. If there’s ever a time to win, there’s even more reason to do so now, but we can’t carry that burden. We have to accept the responsibility of who we’re representing, and the times that we’re representing everybody in. We would love to win for everybody even more now.”
For Kidney and co, there would appear to be as much a mental challenge as a technical one. That’s as ever it was, but perhaps more so last season and this, for having reached the mountain top, do the management and players have the hunger to do so again? “Are you asking me which was the harder Heineken Cup to win,” he chuckles, in reference to Munster’s 2006 and 2008 Heineken Cup triumphs which, actually, is a better way of putting it. “It’s like everything in life, what’s in the past is in the past.”
A different past, given there’s only a two-year gap since the last one rather than one of six decades. But however much a player might be sated by such success, he argues, is offset by the confidence which is gained. “You can’t win it the same way because it was based on sheer desire and topped by skill. That sheer desire won’t be matched, but confidence will. We know this is doable now.”
You also wonder if, no less than the players, have the coaches been in any way sated, or might lack a little desire to refresh things “The law changes have done that,” he answers sharply, adding: “I don’t work with fellas who think they’ve won something in the past. I work with fellas who only want to win the next match. That’s why I ask them to help me, because they’re ambitious guys. And we have too much responsibility to everybody not to. I wouldn’t see that has changed in any way. It’s very hard to enjoy yourself in this job if you’re not winning. We’d be as one on that. I wouldn’t speak for them often, but I would on that. It’s too important.”
Besides which, he points out, different players have come through. Right enough, the team that embarked upon that Slam two years ago – which was the exact same team except for Gordon D’Arcy coming in for Paddy Wallace – is liable to be about two-thirds different come kick-off at the Stadio Flaminio next Saturday.
That can be refreshing of course, albeit a mite too refreshing. You put it to him that, privately, he and the rest of the Irish management would have looked at their casualty list and asked “‘why us?”, perhaps even with a few expletives thrown in. He chuckles. But he doesn’t make excuses because, it genuinely appears, there aren’t any now, though he might have had this happened sooner in his reign.
“That will do them no good. I know the work we’ve done over the last two years so the players who do play, I know they’ll give it everything, and that’s always been our mantra. Anything less than that, people are right to have a go. Mistakes can happen but anything less than a full effort? That isn’t right. So we’ll give it that and I also happen to believe if we do that, we’ll be knocking on the door.”
He cites the November series. “Had we stayed with the same 15 we’d be goosed now whereas now we’re not. Now we have the squad so we can carry the bangs and knocks, so I’d like to think that that was groundwork. For a team that was supposedly “gone” two years ago, we’ve all of those plus a younger crop coming through. If we had an over-30 versus under-30s match now we’d have a good game. But for Ireland, I’d be quite proud of that, that we’ve managed to get to that stage.”
The conclusion to last season’s Six Nations constituted something of a benchmark, with Ireland seeking to develop less of a percentage game, with much more of a ball-in-hand game and less kicking. You’d imagine the sense of anti-climax at that Croke Park farewell has come more into focus with the onset of this championship, but Kidney denies this was the intention, or that the scars still linger.
“We didn’t go out against Scotland with the view we were going to run everything in the first 10 minutes. What we did was . . . we got good ball and it presented itself that way. So then you have to go for it,” he says, going through the subsequent summer tour and November series.
Despite the setbacks along the way, Ireland are not for turning.
“Now we can go back into ourselves and start kicking more but because of the law changes we know that that won’t get us anywhere.”
The bottom line is whether Ireland have the skills to implement their newer game as effectively as the simpler, older one? “Yeah, I believe we have a skills set that is Irish and what we need to do is adjust the plan to that. If we try and copy Australia and New Zealand . . . anybody who copies anything the best you’re aiming for is second. We’re Irish. We should never be willing to settle for second, right. So let’s make it Irish with the players that we have out on the pitch at that particular time against the opposition at that particular time.
“New Zealand have an approach. No matter who they’re playing they’ll play the same way. That suits their strengths. We have to adjust ours slightly. That’s not a poor reflection on us. That’s a reflection of our strengths that we can actually do that.”
Ireland have simply had to adapt to the law changes anyway. He rewinds and compares to the kick-tennis years.
“Now it’s a little bit because you want to go this way, a little bit because you have to go this way and then you change two or three players and all of a sudden you’ve a different type of game as well then too so. It needs to suit our players, it needs to suit the laws, it needs to suit the type of opposition that you’re playing against.”
So it was, Kidney says, Ireland could more readily take on the All Blacks defence out wide, less so against Argentina, with their fast-up, more of an umbrella defence. How Ireland reacted to that, by reverting to kicking, at times, needlessly and not all that well. “We weren’t that good in our kicking,” he readily acknowledges, although he stresses the experience of four matches on successive weekends against vastly contrasting opposition will be especially helpful come the World Cup, before “parking” that tournament.
“We’ve done our World Cup preparation now, and the best way of preparing for a World Cup now is to win the next match.”
Recall the Slam of four years ago, and the brilliantly-executed try by Jamie Heaslip in the first half which put Ireland ahead and gave them the belief to beat France, which in turn gave them the momentum to take from game to game.
Recall also the error-strewn first half of the first match last November against South Africa, and if Kidney could have one 40 minutes back in the autumn series it was that period.
“We tried so hard. We tried too hard,” he reflects. “What would have cost me a bit of sleep was the fact that we spilled the passes . . . what helped me get back to sleep was the fact that we tried. In any form of life everybody will tell you have to go through a little bit of pain sometimes to gain anything. That’s what we’ve done and you can’t buy experience.”
Statistics, damned lies and statistics. Five defeats out of their last seven maybe, but he points out you could also say it’s two wins out of Ireland’s last three.
Eddie O’Sullivan used to say that Italy were at their most fired up and dangerous on opening day, all the more so in Rome. Kidney would probably concur. “They’re freshest. Everybody is level. Everybody is on zero, and now they’re Magners League. They’re more familiar with us.
“I think before, if the truth be known, if you stayed the pace with 10 minutes to go you knew that in the last 10 minutes you’d get them in the legs. Right, they could only make seven subs so you’d find a gap with the last minute do go. You won’t do that now.”
Ironically, the original general election date was for the Friday of the Welsh game. Whereas the new date could be that of the preceding trek to Edinburgh, with the result and promise of, well, a newer dawn, due out that Sunday. Not quite out of sight and out of mind, but not centre stage either. Only a game, eh?
“We’re going into a Six Nations where that (the election) will take all the news. We’ll be separate, but there’ll be comparisons. The job is huge, but being Irish and doing it is very important to me.”
Unlike his predecessor or one of his rivals, there were no contracts until the end of the 2011-12 season for Kidney, nor have there been any four-year extensions offered yet. Suddenly, there’s an end in sight. This could be his last Six Nations. It would reflect better on the health of Irish rugby and the Irish team if there were a desire to have him continue, but it’s not something he’s keen to discuss.
“I’ll phone you next year if I need a ticket,” he jokes self-deprecatingly.
As ever, he masks it well.
Kidney on the changed game, and the
changed demands on players' fitness
“You do need to be aerobically fit. Strength is still huge and I’m not a physicist but maybe the velocity is still increasing. Increasing it with size probably suited the kicking game because fellas didn’t have to run as much because there was fellas taking up that midfield position. Now all of a sudden with the kicking laws and the offside laws fellas have to be running 30 yards this way and 30 yards that way and that takes a whole different kettle of fish. So you know there was a time whereby if you went over a one-minute passage of play people thought it was brilliant. Now a one-minute passage of play is average.”
Kidney on the upcoming Six Nations and developing a squad
“This Six Nations will be extremely difficult as well. I suppose two years ago this team was supposed to be over the hill, but it’s forever changing. So we have all the fellows who have won something. We have all that experience. We’ve younger fellas coming through. We’re mixing and matching that. But how many opportunities can you give fellas at international level? That’s how cut-throat it is because when people pay their hard-earned money they come and pay to watch Ireland win. They at least want to see us playing well.”
