THE TIME BETWEEN 15 October at the Stade de France and this week in The Algarve was enough of a break for Ireland’s coaches, says Simon Easterby.
“I think we could have probably come back the next week.”
But it did afford Ireland’s defence coach, and Andy Farrell’s entire coaching ticket, the space to compute what exactly went wrong against the All Blacks on that crushing night in Paris.
There was retrospection and introspection. And the verdict in the end was that Ireland’s World Cup exit was the result of their imperfection when it mattered most.
“We’ve been very good at taking opportunities and making sides pay for opportunities they have given us,” Easterby says. “We probably didn’t make the most of the opportunities in that game.
“And we also… The defence has been strong, had been strong throughout the World Cup. But we conceded three tries in a game. And New Zealand are one team who have the ability to score from anywhere. They did that — but they probably didn’t have to work as hard for their scores as we would have liked.
“There are lots of other things: individual work-ons, et cetera. But like any game, you reflect, and sometimes you get beaten and you’ve done everything in your power. I think we were close to that, we weren’t far off. We were a hair’s breadth away from scoring at the end. Fine, fine margins.
“The maul was really effective: we destroyed them at times in that area. We got on the wrong side of some refereeing decisions. But at the end of the day, it was 28-24. Very little in it.”
With Ireland’s squad regathered for the first time in Portugal this week ahead of Six Nations kick-off away to France in Marseille next Friday, Easterby stresses that there has been no real need to draw a line under the World Cup — the way most Ireland supporters wish they could.
The former international back row says that Ireland have instead this week openly reviewed their campaign as they would any other previous test window, reiterating a lot of the good that was done in victory against South Africa and Scotland and pinpointing areas from the quarter-final defeat in which they will need to improve over the next seven days.
With a Friday-night kick-off at the Stade Velodrome, Ireland will move their typical game-week schedule forward by a day. They’ll rest tomorrow, Sunday will become their Monday, and so on.
Then, it’ll be onto the French Riviera midweek by which stage the World Cup will slide further towards the bowels of all of our subconsciouses, albeit it will be difficult to bury altogether.
“I know it will be highlighted in the press in the build-up next week,” says Easterby. “It’s probably a game that people thought would have been fitting for a World Cup final — but it wasn’t.
We get the second prize of going after each other in the first game in a place that most of the players and certainly the coaches haven’t been to.
Marseille brings with it a change of scenery not only for next Friday’s hosts but for Ireland, too.
Easterby explains how his side had developed such a grá for the Stade de France, which ostensibly became Ireland’s home stadium over the autumn.
“We have to trust what we know we did there and take it to Marseille,” he adds. “It will be hostile; a brilliant atmosphere, I’m sure, under the lights on a Friday night.
“There are not many better places we’d wish to be on the opening weekend of the Six Nations. It’s up to us to make sure we prepare the players in the right way that they can hit the ground running and really attack the game.”
As things stand, every one of Andy Farrell’s 34-man squad (indeed, every member of the wider 37-man panel) that travelled to Portugal is fully fit to face the French. The two most glaring absentees will be the retired Johnny Sexton and Connacht wing Mack Hansen, who is recovering from a dislocated shoulder.
France, meanwhile, will be without frontliners in the respective shapes of Thibaud Flament, Emmanuel Meafou, Anthony Jelonch, Antoine Dupont and Romain Ntamack.
There is rarely an optimal time to face Fabien Galthiés Bleus on their own patch but doing so away from the Stade de France while they’re missing players and leaders of that calibre — and at the relatively goofy time of 8pm on a Friday night — could be as close as it gets for a few years.
Eastbery, though, is more concerned by the players that France will have at their disposal, including next-man-up half-backs who are approaching world-class form as a club partnership. “[Maxime] Lucu and [Mathieu] Jalibert are ripping it up for Bordeaux,” he says. “[Thomas] Ramos for Toulouse, [Grégory] Aldritt has come back after a break looking fresh.
“Listen, you can look at it in two ways. It’s a tough task whatever you’re doing, going to play France in France — or you can look at it and go, ‘What an opportunity. What an opportunity we have to go to France and start the Six Nations on a great footing.’
“We lost our last Test match. Okay it was a few months back at the World Cup — but this team knows how to win and they want to get back on that winning run. And no better place to start that than this week.”