JUDGE IT PURELY on the basic stats and Ireland have the joint-best lineout in this Six Nations.
They have won 92% of their lineouts according to Opta, which leaves them level with England at the top of the charts.
Ireland are also joint-top with Scotland for lineout steals with five in their four games so far.
The Irish lineout ran at a 100% success rate in their first two games against France and Italy before Wales applied more pressure and Ireland dropped to 86%, a number that doesn’t factor in three scrappy Irish wins.
Ireland were at 85% last weekend against England including two losses but not counting a George Martin steal that went straight back into touch for another Irish lineout.
It certainly wasn’t disastrous for Ireland but Tadhg Beirne, who has taken over as their primary lineout caller for this Six Nations, knows there are improvements to be made ahead of this weekend’s clash with Scotland.
“With the team England picked, they were obviously targeting that area and they did,” said Beirne. “They got after one or two balls.
“Hindsight is a great thing, isn’t it? I’m kicking myself for one or two calls that they stole.”
Defensively, Ireland managed to make one lineout steal through Beirne but he felt they could have been better on that side of the ball.
“We kind of went away from it defensively a little bit from what we’d been doing, which was tough to watch back, frustrating,” said Beirne.
“We just didn’t get in the air when we should have and there was one or two where I could have got in the air and just for a split second I doubt myself and I don’t jump.
“Earlier in the campaign, I probably wasn’t doing that and I don’t know why I did it in that moment. Same with later in the game when the same thing happened for a number of us. We said at the start that we would back ourselves in defence and we will certainly be going back to that again.”
There is a hyper-focus on Ireland’s lineout in this Six Nations because it was an area where they struggled at times in the World Cup last year. Forwards coach Paul O’Connell runs this area of the game and will have been working tirelessly to make improvements.
Ireland’s overall 82.5% lineout success at the World Cup had them ranked 13th out of 20 teams in the tournament, according to Opta.
The key lineout loss last weekend was a steal by Ollie Chessum near the halfway line that resulted in Ben Earl making a big linebreak, with Ireland captain Peter O’Mahony then sin-binned for his actions as his side scrambled in defence. From there, England kicked into the corner and scored their third try through Earl.
That all made it feel much bigger than ‘just’ a lineout loss.
“It’s always a big moment if you steal a lineout or if you lose a lineout,” said Beirne. “Sometimes teams just guess the right area and there’s nothing you can do. Then sometimes there are bad calls.
“Credit to England, the one before Pete’s yellow card, they had an incredible defensive lineout. We had scouted them and thought we could get them in that area, but they defended it well.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have made that call, I probably could have went to an easier call, but sometimes you want to back our drill and that’s what I did, but it was the wrong decision.
“As I said, you can’t dwell on those things, we are focused on Scotland and how they defend and how they attack. Hopefully, we will get it right this weekend.”
It’s not hard to imagine O’Connell obsessing over the ones that get away from Ireland at lineout time.
He is renowned for the detail of his analysis and it must hurt each time the Irish lineout is picked off. But Ireland lock Iain Henderson, who is also an experienced lineout caller, says their forwards coach is calm in his approach.
“Paulie is good,” said Henderson. “I think he is realistic in what our expectations are and when things don’t go well, we sit down and have good constructive conversations about why things didn’t go well.
“More often than not, it’s not down to who often gets the blame, be it the hooker. Often it will be a wrong movement and it’s difficult for anyone to say that a lineout’s not done correctly because they don’t know exactly what lineout a team is trying to do.
“It could be half a yard where we’ve jumped it all week a half yard further forward or backwards which changes the hooker’s throw and it looks like he’s overthrown it but he has thrown to the same place.
“So there’s a huge amount there and it’s all about our consistency. Paulie is great at driving that and I think it’s something he does really well in driving guys’ standards, not only jumping but lifting and throwing as well.”
Coming back to that lineout against England that was followed by a linebreak and O’Mahony’s yellow card, Henderson suggested that how Ireland backed up the loss by making more errors was symbolic of their overall performance in Twickenham.
Reacting well to moments like losing a lineout is key to how this Ireland team want to operate.
“I think it’s something that on the whole we’re really good at but we weren’t good at it on the weekend – being able to just shift our focus when something negative has happened and not back it up again,” said Henderson.
“As a group, generally, if you look at us historically, we’ve been good at that when something doesn’t go well or two or three things don’t go in our favour be it a mistake or something else, we’re usually good at getting on with the next thing and having trust in the guys beside us, not having to go and fix problems ourselves.
“Maybe more than one or two of us were doing things probably out on our own at the weekend which is probably out of character for us. We’ve addressed and chatted about that this week.”
