IT FELT FOR all the world as though Ireland had done the hard work in their pool by beating the reigning champions, and yet instead we find ourselves unable to even look forward to a quarter-final.
For three years, the meeting with South Africa felt like The Big One. Credit to Scotland, though: they’ve ticked their boxes against Romania and Tonga especially and now, here comes their own Big One.
Gregor Townsend and co will have suspected since the draw was made in December 2020 that Scotland’s World Cup fate would depend on their final pool game with Ireland. So it has proven, and so it all comes down to Paris on Saturday.
Ireland won’t mind that their own fate in the competition remains entangled in Scotland’s. The players won’t have given any heed to the talk of losing bonus points or permutations or mathematical improbabilities. Ultimately, they’ll see their job through a more straightforward lens of having to beat Scotland, against whom they have won eight games on the spin.
They’ll also know that very few of those games have been easy.
Scotland are pretty much the same team now as the one I faced during my career. They have a very potent back three in Duhan van der Merwe, Darcy Graham, and now Blair Kinghorn who has been running riot against the weaker teams in the pool.
They play this amazing brand of rugby and they can hurt any team in the world — if you allow them to.
Ireland have, for the most part, prevented that from happening in recent meetings.
South Africa laid the latest blueprint as to how to deconstruct Scotland earlier in the pool: you have to win the set-piece arm wrestle — scrum and maul — and you have to get after Finn Russell.
To be clear, I don’t consider Russell a weakness for this Scottish team. He’s an incredibly talented player and I would consider him to be one of the very best out-halves in the tournament.
But he’s so integral to Scotland’s identity as an attacking force that he is the natural focal point for opposition defences. He is literally the fulcrum of Scotland’s team, more so than any other 10 on any other team.
The key for Ireland will be to deny Russell time and space — and to not buy any of his dummies which so often extend his time and space on the ball as well as creating that luxury for others.
Russell is such an amazingly skilled player that he’ll nearly always make something happen in a game. He’s superb at identifying space in the backfield and he could easily pin you with a 50/22. And sometimes with a player of his calibre, there’s just nothing you can do.
But Ireland’s intention as a defence should be to force someone other than Russell to be to one to make the play. Send Josh van der Flier after him early and often. Even get Jamison Gibson-Park stepping on his toes as soon as possible. You’ll never have a perfect game in rugby, but putting Russell under pressure and making him play the ball early, before he gets to the gain-line, would be a good place to start.
Another would be getting the lineout right. Ireland lost six of their own throws — five of them early — against South Africa and the fact that they had to shorten the lineout to secure possession definitely put the brakes on elements of their attack.
The lineout really is a game of inches and when you have two South African pods going up at full stretch, it makes for a seriously difficult throw.
On top of the reality that South Africa simply deserve credit for their lineout ‘D’ the last day, Ireland have now had an extra week’s prep ahead of Scotland. I’m confident they’ll have a really strong plan in place.
Along with Paul O’Connell behind the scenes, as well as Peter O’Mahony and Iain Henderson who shored things up against the Springboks, I’d expect James Ryan to have played a massive role in putting things right over the last fortnight — even though he won’t start on Saturday.
James — or ‘JR’ to his teammates — has always been strong in the lineout but in the last couple of seasons, he’s really put his hand up and said, ‘I’m going to be that guy who runs this part of our game.’
O’Connell has helped him to blossom in that role for Ireland, and I feel he’s still massively underappreciated in lineout defence especially. JR is always well capable of stealing one or two lineouts in a game, which is huge in test rugby, but even if he doesn’t win the turnover, it’s the amount of general disruption he causes on opposition ball which makes him so valuable.
And just like Henderson a couple of weeks ago, JR can add some real punch off the bench alongside the likes of Rónan Kelleher and Jack Conan.
James is a lot bigger now than when he first started playing professional rugby: he’s up at around 120kg but remains super fit and as agile as ever. And honestly, good luck mauling against a guy who’s six-foot-seven and 120kg, particularly if your legs are a little heavy in the second half.
Having that extra weight, particularly in an Irish pack that wouldn’t be quite as heavy as its South African or French equivalent, is hugely important.
What was really impressive about Ireland’s win over South Africa was that they won ugly. They hung in the game and showed their resilience.
To be able to win against world-class opposition on a bad day is important, and they should be able to win against the world’s fifth-best team on a good one.
I still see it being a serious test for Ireland but if they can get after Russell, I think they have the measure of Scotland and will get the job done again.
If we dare peer ahead, then, for a moment, that would mean that Ireland would face New Zealand in the quarters.
The All Blacks reduced Italy to resembling more of a Romania or a Namibia rather than a Six Nations team, which obviously strikes as bad news for Ireland or whoever winds up meeting Ian Foster’s side in the last eight.
But to be honest, it’s for this exact reason that I still think it’s tough to gauge how good New Zealand truly were. The Italians’ heads were completely gone from such an early stage that, in practicality, they almost became a Romania or Namibia such was the speed with which they mentally checked out of the contest.
What we can say for certain is that the All Blacks were as ruthless as their teams of old and, maybe most ominously, they played like a wounded animal in what was a must-win game for them.
I still think there is more to be gauged from their pool opener with France if I was to look at the All Blacks as quarter-final opponents. New Zealand, though, will equally have learned from that defeat to the hosts and, with Uruguay to come in their final pool game, they can essentially treat this as a two-week run-up to their quarter. They’ll almost certainly have begun preparing for Ireland already.
That they can do so with Joe Schmidt in their camp adds another dimension to that prep, and another subplot to Ireland’s World Cup story.
I played under Joe and make no mistake about this: he will 100% be gunning for Ireland.
He’s super detail-oriented so he’ll have profiles up of every Irish player: their tendencies, their strengths and weaknesses, which foot they step off — everything.
He’ll have insights into the thinking of his former assistant, Andy Farrell.
And he’ll have a sour taste in his mouth about how things ended at the last World Cup, the same as every Irish rugby fan.
It could be the ultimate Irish-rugby villain arc for Joe, which is mad to think about given all he achieved for this country.
Anyway, such is the nature of Ireland’s pool draw, we don’t even have the luxury of being able to think about that yet.
Who do you think will win Saturday’s showdown between Ireland and Scotland? (Odds courtesy of BoyleSports)
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