RUGBY:THE IRISH squad regrouped in their new base on the outskirts of windy Auckland yesterday to assess the fall-out from the bonus point that got away against the USA. They still haven't found what they are looking for but the game they've been planning towards for about a year now looms.
Australia, newly-crowned Tri-Nations champions are cock-a-hoop after their bonus point win over Italy. Much of their media clearly see this Irish team as no more than a road bump and with their publicity campaign on behalf of their scrum augmented by Dan Vickerman adding some mongrel to their pack, they have a beastly backrow and two wonderfully creative game breakers at halfback as well as pace, footwork and invention aplenty out wide.
Necessity being the mother of invention and all that, a somewhat similar backdrop appeared to concentrate the minds (and more importantly the accuracy) when England came calling for the Grand Slam last March. It looks a forlorn hope perhaps, but forwards coach Gert Smal maintained Ireland can find what they’re looking for this week.
Smal conceded the win over England remains something of a stand-alone performance in the last year or more. “You could put it that way, it’s the type of game that we want to put together and that we work towards all the time. We’re not satisfied with less than that. That’s the kind of standard that we want to maintain continually.”
In which case, the inability to do so before or since must do his head in? “I would lie if I said ‘no’ but, again, it’s to see how you can activate the players in a certain way; keep their confidence going so that they could pull it out at the right time. Because if you’re too harsh on them all the time, then they’re also going to go into themselves a little bit and that’s what you don’t want, especially when it comes to a World Cup.
“So you have to get the balance right, putting on enough pressure but also just keeping their confidence high all the time and letting them realise what they have, because they have something special in the team and you just need to bring it out. I think if you can cut down a little bit on the mistakes you can build a little bit more momentum and it’s a different ball game.”
Confidence remained good, he assured us, and form, he said, can turn in 80 minutes. “It can turn very quickly. Obviously, the first World Cup game is always a nervous start, it’s not just us, all the other teams. It is easy to say in hindsight but maybe if we could have finished a few more opportunities we got, and kicked a couple of penalties we got, that would have extinguished their fire a little bit,” said Smal, who hailed the Eagles’ defensive effort as the best he’d seen from them in a long time.
Although the set-pieces went well, Smal admitted they could have made more use of quick lineout ball off the top rather than over-playing the maul, “because variation is always a key in rugby, it makes you unpredictable”.
To a degree they were saving variations for the Australian game, he said, but not that this had been pre-planned.
Another striking feature of the weekend was how much specialist opensides have been able to slow down or steal opposition ball at the breakdown, and Ireland’s difficulties here are brought into sharp focus by the knowledge they’re playing David Pocock and co (hooker Stephen Moore is also highly effective in this area).
For Smal, the primary issue facing Ireland is getting there quickly and effectively. “Absolutely, you want to have the ball player plus three, so at least four to the ball all the time, with your scrumhalf. So that’s one area we want to get right and it’s probably an area they will target, I think. They will target our pack and they’ll target our back line. Those are the challenges for us.”
Smal was less concerned about what appeared to be vastly different interpretations at the breakdown, with Craig Joubert and Wayne Barnes allowing more latitude than the likes of Bryce Lawrence (who is in charge next Saturday at Eden Park), Alain Rolland and Nigel Owens (who was much sharper than he had been when refereeing the Ireland-England game in the Aviva).
Nonetheless, some Irish players expressed surprise in the immediate aftermath of the game, particularly after watching England v Argentina the night before. “I liked the way he refereed it, to be honest,” said Geordan Murphy of Lawrence’s performance. “He wanted a quick game. If you cleaned someone out and stayed on your feet that was fair. If you went off your feet, you were penalised. We watched it in the team room.
“The way England have been playing in the last few weeks is they’ve been playing right on the edge. They’ve been flying into rucks very hard and fast but probably not noses up. They’ve been noses down. They’ve been making some big hits. I think they’ve probably got away with a little bit in the last few weeks and Bryce Lawrence said no.
“Ireland don’t ruck like that. We don’t fire in head down. We’re more technically correct. We’ll see how he referees it.”
Stephen Ferris admitted the breakdown area against the Eagles degenerated into a street brawl.
“They seemed to adapt to the referee and it probably took us a bit longer to adapt to Craig Joubert. I thought their seven caused us a bit of difficulty, but we’ll work on that for next week.”
