IT COULD HAVE been worse.
Ireland false-started this year’s Six Nations, conceding three tries in the opening 30 minutes of the tournament. But they could have thrown in the towel, failed to respond by re-taking the lead or let Scotland kill them off, score a fourth try and put five points between the sides on the Championship table rather than just three.
The reaction to the early failings is the positive spin. And that’s what Ireland are holding on to for confidence ahead of what promises to be another bruising outing against Italy.
A positive attitude is essential in a collision sport, but on weeks like this it has to be somewhat manufactured within a camp so that the see-saw of confidence can be quickly levelled off.
“It’s not healthy,” says Keith Earls.
“Rugby isn’t healthy for the mind. It’s up and down. You could be on top of the world one week and then you’re back down. You’re representing your country which is always massive, you know the whole nation is watching you and the people that travel and then when you have a poor start, you come so close and then you lose it’s extremely disappointing.
“Especially looking back on it again, we had unbelievable opportunities and we beat ourselves. We let Scotland beat us.”
The confidence to start that comeback in Rome comes from, not only the November exploits or the two titles in the last three years, but from how they played Scotland with a 16-point handicap. The big regret will remain the defensive issues that allowed Vern Cotter’s men build that lead and that the efforts made didn’t bear fruit any sooner.
Then we addressed it at half-time. We did everything we said we were going to do and I think we made a good Scotland side look really average in the second half.
“We crawled back into it and we were ahead by a point but 14-5 down and then 21-8 at half-time I think it was, we were making it very hard for ourselves. Imagine if we started well, it would have been a lot different.”
All week, Joe Schmidt’s squad will have been working on putting the start right so that the performance and result can fall into place behind. However, facing the Azzurri has always had one constant problem. Even if they’re at a low ebb, Test rugby is never an automatic cake-walk and there is very little credit to be won from beating the regular wooden-spooners soundly.
This week Ireland have no excuse for looking beyond or failing to fire against Italy. Having already lost ground on England, Wales and Scotland they must mirror the comeback in Murrayfield – the part before they let the lead slip again, that is – in the remainder of the wider Championship. But Earls is well aware that Italy will unleash an early onslaught to be reckoned with. It’s not going to be easy.
“Jesus, not watching their first half (against Wales). It’s going to be unbelievably physical. It always is over there.
“I think Conor O’Shea and Mike Catt are doing a good job with them. Listening to them last week, they’re just looking for an 80-minute performance and if they can do that they’re going to run any team until the end. They have already beaten us in Rome a couple of years ago. They’re another team on the up I suppose, they can produce a big performance like South Africa, but then they lost to Tonga the week after.”
“You can’t give them belief. They’re a passionate team, if you give them belief, they will come after you so it’s about looking after ourselves as well this week.”
In a competition as short as the Six Nations, the margin for error has already disappeared for Ireland. They’ve backed themselves into a corner and now it’s time to fight their way out.
“It is a bit of pressure but we can take positives from it, if we had scored one more try and won we would have been on the other side.
“Look, we’ll go to Rome with a lot of confidence, even though we lost, because we know it was a lot of our own mistakes and we can fix them.
“The competition is massive. Teams are going to win and teams are going to lose. There’s going to be bonus points and there isn’t so I suppose we’ll wait and see until the French week and after that we’ll start worrying about the table then.”
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