Tour of South Africa: Gerry Thornley talks to the defensive coach, Mike Ford, about the measures he has introduced to try to move Ireland to the next level.
A wounded Springbok is a dangerous Springbok, as coach Eddie O'Sullivan has noted, in which case Ireland's opponents in Bloemfontein on Saturday could be very dangerous. Especially in what are likely to be ferocious opening salvos.
Backed into a corner, and hemmed together in camp for weeks, there'll be few cheery greetings when they are unleashed come kick-off time (3.0 locally, 2.0 Irish). Think back to the way the Boks emerged from the dressing-room in their grudge pool match against England in Perth last October and something of a similar hue can be anticipated this Saturday. There mightn't be much in the way of frills. All rugby matches are first and foremost about the physical confrontation nowadays, but never more so than in the Boks' lair.
One ventures Ireland's defensive coach, Mike Ford, has been earning his corn this past fortnight.
"They're going to be very aggressive," he admits, candidly. "They'll come out at a million miles an hour, and it will be a knees-and-elbows type of running. They'll try to ruck us out of the way as quickly as possible and we've just really got to stand up to that. "I'm not too sure they'll ask too many questions of us, to make a decision. There might not be too many intricate plays. They'll be direct and hard. We've worked very hard on standing up to this and not being intimidated. First and foremost we've got to stand up to them."
Judging by the couple of once-a-week open sessions, Ford and Eddie O'Sullivan have been placing a heavy emphasis on enveloping opposing ball carriers to prevent offloads with double tackles.
"Once they get confidence they do offload in the tackle well. But it's an area we have to improve anyway," admits Ford. "We've brought that to the top of our list because we do struggle with the French offloading. We've worked on the execution of our two-man tackles and that's good in another way because two-man tackles encourage aggression."
Ford is content with the progress the Irish defence has made in his two-and-a-half years with the team, but he's impatient to take it on to the next level.
"I'm happy enough they understand the system but we're always looking to tweak it anyway. Two-man tackles, improve our line speed to move up quicker as well; we've got to mix up our defence and keep the opposition guessing."
Improving Ireland's "resetting" is another key area, i.e. "getting the right man in the right place all the time. In other words, not having John Hayes at outside centre and Brian O'Driscoll at pillar one. We're still not there yet."
The former Springbok coach Nick Mallett has said France's 43-21 World Cup quarter-final win over Ireland was the template which any prospective opponents of Ireland should employ, by suddenly attacking wide after a few phases. In particular he cited the first try when Imanol Harinordoquy gathered Frederic Michalak's crosskick to put Olivier Magne over with only Girvan Dempsey covering across - the Irish defence having been naively drawn across field.
Ford holds his hands up for that try. "I messed up there. We knew Harinordoquy stayed by the touchline and we identified their ability to attack wide. We should have read that but we didn't plan for that. Lesson learned."
It was always felt Kevin Maggs was the prototype for a big-hitting inside centre and the team's defensive lynchpin, and the Springboks' beefy, straight-running types are liable to give the Brian O'Driscoll-Gordon D'Arcy midfield partnership it's stiffest defensive test yet.
However Ford says one of the reasons D'Arcy has been seamlessly accommodated in the team is down to the way O'Driscoll has improved his defence. "Brian is one of the best defenders in the world in his position. If you look at what I call his 'system errors', not missed tackles but whether you've misread the system, he is always one of the best. And when I went to watch Gordon D'Arcy play at centre for Leinster at Sale, he cut down Jason Robinson three or four times, because he can read a situation and make a decision."
The ex-rugby league player admits he's learned a lot about the union code, such as defending off scrums, short lineouts and full lineouts. He laughs when recounting how in awe he was for his first defensive drill in Limerick before the 2002 Six Nations.
Under contract until the end of the 2007-8 season, curiously Ford will next season dovetail his Irish job by working one day a week with Saracens. He stresses "Eddie has first call on me all the time, and Saracens are happy with that." Nevertheless, it demonstrates how under-employed he has been in the wider Irish scene. It seems odd Connacht have been the only province to have employed him at all, and that he is now bound even part-time to an English club, yet he is reluctant to talk about this.
"I'm not trying to create a storm or anything like that, and in any case Mark McCall has asked me to help out with Ulster next season."
There's also much more to achieve. Defensively he wants the players to become more adept at recognising an attacking line and reading what they are going to do, to defend what they see.
"Eddie has created an environment where all you can do is improve. We're not going to relax and fall in love with ourselves. I want us to compete against the top four regularly. Ultimately we'll be judged by the World Cup again, I suppose, but I'd like Ireland to win a championship, and ideally win a Grand Slam, and I know it's our target to reach the World Cup semi-finals but why not bloody go and win it?"
• Apart from some lineout practice in the morning, the Irish squad had a day off in Cape Town yesterday, with most of them taking a trek up Table Mountain, visiting the Waterfront area or Robben Island. The squad will have their final full training run this morning before flying up to Bloemfontein.
As expected, the Springbok prop Faan Rautenbach has been ruled out after minor surgery last week on some floating bone in his knee and so CJ van der Linde has been named on the bench.
