THERE WERE NO seats left in conference suite 4 and it was easy to understand why. Andy Farrell is a big name, Owen Farrell an even bigger one.
Well, at least he is to an English audience – which was why this afternoon’s press conference was filled to capacity, a group of English journalists travelling across the pond to specifically ask Farrell about the peculiarities of going up against his son this weekend.
They’d have been safer staying at home. Twenty seconds in, a questioner was straight to the point.
“Andy, given that it is England, Twickenham, your son, is this the most challenging week of your career?”
“I wouldn’t say so,” Farrell replied. “It is another big game.”
And that was that. We learned that Andy varies the number of his conversations with Owen from week to week. “Sometimes we talk five times on the phone, sometimes ten, sometimes just the once.”
This week he has been face-timing his grandson. Twickenham, Ireland, England, rugby, it has not been mentioned once in the Farrell household across the last seven days.
Behind closed doors, in the Ireland team room, Owen Farrell’s name frequently crops up in conversation as you would expect when a top-class international team is preparing to contain the opposition play-maker. “It’s always weird – a father talking about his son in this context,” says Conor Murray. “But Faz just sticks to the task at hand. Sometimes he gives good insights into Owen’s game that we may not have seen.
“But look, the thing is that I have played against Owen a good few times, he is an incredible player, a really good decision maker. That is why he is hard to analyse because it is so tough to predict what he is going to do.”
It was considerably easier predicting what Farrell senior was going to do today with his team selection. Unsurprisingly, his decision to stay with the XV who defeated the Welsh 10 days ago was made easier by the continued absence of Garry Ringrose. The only thing that has changed in the camp is the music – Bono being brought in to sing to the team instead of Christy Moore.
By all accounts, the U2 frontman put on a good show, talking specifically to the players about his Irish identity – which, for a team with players from South African, Samoan and English backgrounds, is a topic worth discussing.
Perhaps there’s logic in here, too – Farrell wanting the team to stand for something, to be comfortable on the big stage. Bono knows all about that kind of pressure, one he embraced, but one so many of his predecessors in an Irish rugby shirt were afraid of.
Earlier this week, on national radio, Keith Wood talked about feeling depressed every time he went to Twickenham and you can understand why. First year the former Ireland captain travelled across, Ireland won – but Wood was on the bench. Thereafter, the only emotion he got from London was a negative one.
Well, I hope our boys won’t be feeling that way before we head over,” Farrell said. “We’re in a good place, two wins from two, but we know our performance level has to be better. It was decent against Wales, but nowhere near perfect. We used last week to try and put a few of those things right.
“We have to because England showed some great spirit to come back in Paris, and showed even more spirit in Murrayfield, getting a good win in horrible conditions. We expect them to be at their best. Mako (Vunipola’s) loss is big as he’s a senior player, a great player but the other boys (Joe Marler and Ellis Genge) are in form. This is a big chance for them.”
And it’s a real chance for Ireland, too. Last August, England beat them 57-15; last February it was 32-20 and even if Farrell said Ireland aren’t motivated by revenge, pointing out that the World Cup warm-up game was scarcely relevant, he still admitted the end scoreline “stung”.
Murray still feels the pain of that loss. “It was a strange game in a lot of ways, a lot went wrong for us but the chances of a similar performance playing out again this time are quite slim,” the Ireland scrum-half said. “We have looked at them to see what we could learn from them but really, we’ve just focused on ourselves again this week.
“We were happy with our performance against the Welsh but we want to up it again, be more accurate, take more of our chances. We had a lot of chances in the first half of that Wales game. We have to go to another level, though. It’s England. Away. It’s a massive test match.”
Enough said.
But Murray wasn’t finished.
“The last time we went to Twickenham for a Six Nations match, our attitude was really good,” said the 30-year-old. “We attacked the game. Defensively our energy was right up there. Before half-time we ended up scoring a try – refusing to let the clock tick down. We backed ourselves to go and do it. There was an awful lot of those aspects of that performance that we want to replicate this weekend.
“And we can because the fear factor (among Irish teams going to Twickenham) is not what it used to be. The respect for England is still there. We are all aware of that. It is tough to perform there. But if you go with the mindset, you can.”
