The higher the bar, the higher the expectations, and the greater the anticlimax when those standards aren’t met. Not only did New Zealand’s 23-13 win end Ireland’s unprecedent 19-match winning run at home, and constitute just a third home defeat in Ireland’s last 43 matches at the Aviva, but it was the manner of the loss which seemed to add to Andy Farrell’s disappointment.
“I think it’s easily summed up with the mood of the dressingroom really,” said the Irish head coach after Ireland’s first loss at the Aviva since France beat them 15-13 behind closed doors in February 2021.
Farrell confirmed the home dressingroom was “pretty sombre as expected”, adding: “The lads are gutted. We’re all gutted together.
“I thought we’d prepped well, trained well, I thought we was excited about the game and we was [sic]. We didn’t manage to put our game out on the field. Obviously, the opposition have a big say in that. But I thought we compounded too many errors and almost suppressed ourselves a little bit at times. The energy and the accuracy wasn’t what was needed to win a big Test match like that.”
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Asked if this defeat will generate renewed hunger to bounce back against Felipe Contepomi’s improving Argentina next Friday night at the Aviva, Farrell said: “It’s a funny old feeling because we don’t tend to have it too much in that dressingroom, but it is what it is. That’s life.
“Congratulations to New Zealand and we move on. We have to do. We have to find the solutions as soon as we possibly can because we’ve got a hungry side in Argentina who are playing some really good rugby at this moment in time.
“So, we need to get back on the horse and start it all over again, don’t we?”
Looking into some of the specifics behind the defeat, Nic Berry’s 13-5 penalty count against Ireland was a hugely significant factor in a rain-affected, scrappy match which never scaled the heights of the World Cup quarter-final epic.
[ All Blacks end Ireland’s winning streak at home with deserving victoryOpens in new window ]
This was particularly so in those critical penalties after Josh van der Flier’s early second-half try briefly put Ireland in front, first for a high clear-out against Lowe with Ireland pressing for another try.
Another breakdown penalty and a dubious scrum penalty against Finlay Bealham soon followed, both of which Damian MacKenzie landed to put the All Blacks back in front, a lead which they never relinquished again.
“We’ll get a few answers in regard to clarification over a few of them but it doesn’t really matter whether it was wrong or right. We still should have suppressed ourselves a little bit.
“It’s not right to try and be desperate, chasing your tail, when you’ve made an error, whether it be a penalty or a dropped ball, and compound that error with another error and all of a sudden field position is gone and points come off the back of that. And we did that a number of times.
“So, we need to fix up our mentality as far as that’s concerned, getting back to neutral and getting the ball back in the way that we want it. We became a little bit too desperate and on the back of that, the energy wasn’t what was needed, or the accuracy. Both of them obviously.”
“We get our own house in order first and there’s no excuses for us,” added Farrell when asked about Berry’s overall performance. “You can talk about all sorts of stuff, rustiness or game time, but there’s no excuse. It is what it is. The opposition, long story short, deserved to win.
“As far as the penalty count, I actually thought the game was stop-start and scrappy, there was a lot of errors because of the weather a little bit that came down but it was a slow enough game at times. We needed to be in charge of looking after our own energy and we didn’t do that well enough.”
If there were positives to be taken from the game, Farrell cited his team “staying in the fight, certainly after half time. The turning point was the crucial penalty from the scrum that they kicked the goal and it started going in their favour and we compounded therefore after.”
Ireland had seem well poised when exploding out of the traps at the start of the second half to take the lead and Caelan Doris admitted: “I was happy with the start of the second half. That was the message at half-time, that we felt we hadn’t really fired a shot and we got momentum back early on in the second-half, and the message was very much stay on that, stay with it.
“But they’re a quality side, obviously, and they came back. Our discipline gave them entry and territory and possession and they came back into it in the second half.”
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