I DON’T THINK any players will be jumping for joy after Ireland’s win at the Olympic Stadium today, but having seen what happened England in the last seven days, they’ll soon get the perspective they need.
I’ll be back in England tomorrow where a World Cup exit will still be raw, and when the Irish players weigh it all up, they’ll soon be able to put it behind them.
They’re through to the quarter-final with a game to go in the pool, and that’s exactly where they planned to be when they met up in camp during the summer.
You only had to look at the English guys last night, the hopes of a nation gone in 80 minutes. Granted Ireland have had an easier pool, but they’ll watch the tape and analyse it and it’ll almost be therapeutic for them.
Every one of those guys has played a game like this before when things didn’t go right and they know how to react. It’s all part of being a professional.
You could see it with Joe Schmidt, Johnny Sexton, Iain Henderson and anyone who did an interview after the game that they were frustrated and disappointed with the performance. Going into the French game they wanted to be hitting their peak and scoring a few tries, and they they didn’t look threatening enough to the Italian defensive line
The speed of the breakdown really disrupted Ireland, and I know exactly the frustration that Conor Murray was experiencing.
The difference between a three second ruck and a six second ruck is enormous, and when you have bodies pulling and dragging at you when you’re trying to fish a ball from a ruck, it can effect your all-round game.
When you’ve got a backrow like Italy’s, they don’t allow you to have go-forward ball. You’re the guy that everybody expects to get it away, but you have an Italian guy stalling it, and then the runners outside you have to stall their runs, and it all gathers together and disrupts the whole gameplan.
But as the game went on and guys realised we weren’t getting any change out of playing wide, we went back to the structured kicking game.
When it became clear this game wasn’t going to be won by 20 points, they just started playing to win. Johnny and Conor started putting up more kicks and retaining ball.
It’s frustrating, because when you’ve been training a lot of what you do is unopposed, certainly in the latter stages of the week. You plan for these three second rucks, and everybody plans their timing off that.
We saw it last night with David Pocock; what a disruptive backrow can do to the whole team. It knocks everybody’s timing off and that creeps through the whole team – from the pods outside the scrum-half right out to the wingers.
The positive is that they guys always have that plan B of a good kicking game, but if you’re going to score tries against France, and challenge sides like Argentina or New Zealand further in the competition, you’re going to have to be able to create more.
Confidence-wise with such a big game against France, this performance won’t have helped things, purely from the momentum lost. Italy didn’t show much, but they set up their game well. Because Ireland will have had a concrete gameplan, the confidence will have been dented, but Joe Schmidt isn’t the kind of coach to focus in on the small picture. Once they see the video and do the analysis it always becomes clear.
I expect Rob Kearney and Jared Payne will play against France if fit, and the only other changes I could see may be on the wings. I think Keith Earls will move back out wide, be it for Tommy or Dave Kearney. Joe Schmidt isn’t the kind of coach to cut apart a team because of performance like that.
At the start of the competition and coming from the Six Nations France looked in disarray, and since the tournament started they’ve slowly been building and building.
The challenge of beating them might seem that bit tougher than it did this time yesterday, but with three wins out of three, it’s job done so far.
