Ireland chasing a perfect 10
SCHMIDT TAKING IT ONE STEP AT A TIME
NOnly twice before in the IRFU’s 680-game history has the national team ever managed to win 10 Test matches in succession.
A win over Wales next Saturday will push an Ireland winning streak into double digit territory for only the third time. Partypooping has more usually been the Irish role.
Look at how Joe Schmidt’s team put an end to New Zealand’s record run of 18 consecutive victories by ambushing them in Chicago in November 2016, a rug-pulling exercise they showed us four months earlier when England were blindsided in Dublin while also on a streak of 18 successive wins.
Ireland are a long way off ever matching what those rampant All Blacks and English sides achieved but beating Wales in six days’ time would be a huge step forward for Schmidt in the on-going evolution of his squad ahead of the 2019 World Cup which will define his legacy in charge.
It’s only 11 months ago when there was outrage that his team had lost two of its initial four matches in last year’s Six Nations. However, their consistency since then in chalking up an array of winning results has been unwavering.
Big wins, small wins, you name it. Ireland have bagged them all despite a massive turnover in personnel. A whopping 57 players have played some part in the nine wins, 47 as starters, with Cian Healy the only player to feature in all nine games.
Twenty-three different players account for the 40 tries scored, Jacob Stockdale, one of 14 new caps, leading the way with six tries in six appearances.
There have been 313 points scored, just 137 conceded, and two kicks have been pivotal in keeping the rare run alive. First, there was Ian Keatley booting Ireland to a late win off the tee when Fiji were on the cusp of earning a November draw.
Then came the Johnny Sexton drop goal in Paris to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat to France.
The trick now is to keep on winning, a difficult task given that it has been in the Six Nations where Ireland’s previous record-setting runs have ended.
It was Eddie O’Sullivan’s side that originally set the bar in 2003, beating Romania in Limerick in a September friendly and going on to beat Wales in round four of the championship for a history-making 10th win.
Their run was then shattered by losing the winner-takes-all Grand Slam showdown with England. Twelve years later, it was Warren Gatland’s Wales who were destroying Schmidt’s Slam ambitions.
Ireland’s 10-match streak began in March 2014 with a home win over Italy and they nudged into double figures by the following February when beating France in Dublin.
Then along came the run-breaking Welsh, a disappointment Ireland hope won’t be repeated next weekend. Not that there will be any talk to media emanating from Carton House in the coming days about Ireland now being nearly a year unbeaten.
The message drilled home in recent times by Schmidt is his team have a game-by-game focus and next Saturday will be viewed by those involved as a one-off rather than part of a bigger picture which everyone else will view it as.
Privately, though, management and players will know this long winning sequence is a huge deal, just as it was three years ago when Tommy Bowe admitted the week before their Welsh loss: ‘I don’t think many people would have really seen Ireland going 10 straight wins. It’s a pretty remarkable achievement but, as a team, we are fully confident.
‘We are getting ourselves into positions where we are hanging on in the last couple of minutes, but we are also getting ourselves into a position where we have a bit of a cushion that we can hold on.
‘We are confident of playing some good rugby at times and we are playing winning rugby at national level.’
Not many people in the aftermath of last March’s loss at Cardiff would have predicted this Ireland would notch up nine straight wins, but they bounced back impressively to deny England a second successive Grand Slam and the looming re-fixture versus the Welsh is now their golden opportunity to endorse the upward curve they feel they have since been on.
Schmidt will understand the pressures, not only from what happened his side away to Wales in 2015 but also from the 20match unbeaten run he once had at the helm in Leinster, a gallop that had 18 wins and two draws in 2011/12 before Ospreys played spoilsports.
Time for the coach to put a stop to this Welsh meddling and ensure Ireland secure a much-desired record-equalling 10th successive win. OW the hill gets much steeper for Ireland. Not just in terms of their Six Nations title challenge. Next Saturday they have a chance at matching a feat rarely experienced in 144 years of hard graft.