ILLUSTRATIVE OF MACK Hansen’s performance against Scotland was the fact that Sam Warburton named him player of the match even in a game when Josh van der Flier fairly capably threw into Ireland’s lineout and Cian Healy monstered Scotland’s scrum from hooker.
Mind you, Hansen was also Ireland’s biggest jackal threat as Murrayfield came to resemble Bizarro World and Ireland’s men of steel faced a thorough examination of their mettle.
Andy Farrell is mad for the idea of this group of players being exposed to ‘adversity’ in advance of the World Cup but even he would acknowledge that Sunday took the piss.
The Ireland head coach would likely acknowledge, too, that Hansen is the type of rugby footballer who probably doesn’t need such psychological preparation: if a giant meteorite was hurtling towards the earth, you would probably still find Mack Hansen with a ball in his hand, impishly jinking his way through the screaming masses and looking to feed a support runner.
When The42′s Murray Kinsella asked Farrell and Johnny Sexton about Hansen’s cool demeanour even when all hell was breaking loose at Murrayfield, the Ireland skipper could only laugh while Farrell’s initial response was, “Mack? Wow… He had cramp at one stage, you know, and he forgot all about it, thank goodness.
“He just kept finding a way to get himself involved in the game and that’s what he is: he’s just a player, like, y’know? Him and James Lowe are pretty similar in that regard. He’s just a player trying to make things happen.”
One of those key Hansen involvements led to a try for his kindred spirit on the opposite flank. Jamison Gibson-Park’s decision to box kick a contestable from between the Scottish 10-metre line and 22′ seemed a curious one but any Irish bewilderment instantly gave way to guttural noise as Hansen took the skies and seized the ball over the comparably giant figure of Duhan van der Merwe.
Sexton said afterwards that he probably should have scored from Hansen’s ensuing offload — only it seemed so unlikely that he hadn’t anticipated it; he had rushed to Hansen in preparation for a clean-out instead.
Prior to kick-off, the match-up of Van der Merwe on Hansen would have given a lot of Irish fans the spooks but it will instead be the world-rated Scottish wing who will tonight find himself tossing and turning and plotting his World Cup revenge.
Aside from one spillage — this after Hansen had won his second jackal turnover early in the second half — Ireland’s most mercurial player was equally their surest hand when things looked hairy.
Hansen’s own first-half try, a fitting finish in the right-hand corner to a picture-perfect left-handed pass by Hugo Keenan, steadied Ireland at a time when Scotland had ripped back the early momentum.
His claim over Van der Merwe was catalytic at a time in which the game was on a knife-edge and Lowe’s subsequent score, complemented by Sexton’s touchline conversion, was a haymaker in that it pushed Ireland into a two-score lead.
And while players like James Ryan, Peter O’Mahony, and the dual-roled Josh van der Flier were surely in the man-of-the-match mix entering the final quarter, Hansen put that relative triviality to bed as Ireland tucked the game in with their third.
It all felt jarringly simple as Jack Conan crossed near the right-hand corner. Where had the space come from?
It was only upon the replays that it was laid bare how Hansen had solved the Rubik’s Cube. Receiving the ball from Gibson-Park, he feinted outside and then back in, holding the ball for the additional fraction of a second it took to suck in all three of Sione Tuipuluto, Huw Jones and Van der Merwe. Hugo Keenan put the ribbon on the Scottish defensive trio with a decoy run and Hansen flicked the underage coach’s dream pass — no spiral, all wrists — out to Conan who was home and hosed.
It was an archetypal example of why Hansen remains so integral to Ireland: while there are more explosive wingers and certainly stronger defenders in his position, his all-round footballing ability is such that he always needs dealing with but he’s virtually impossible for opposition defence coaches to plot against.
It’s mad to think that he has played in only eight championship games for Ireland. Madder again is that he’s been player of the match in three of them: at home to Wales last year and back to back in Rome and Edinburgh this time around.
Still a couple of weeks shy of his 25th birthday, the half-Corkonian Connacht wing from Canberra will pocket plenty more of those awards yet at the rate he’s going.
