‘Depth is our strong point’
GIVEN his own ongoing battle with loosehead rival Cian Healy, Jack McGrath is well qualified to discuss the Ireland squad’s strength in depth.
McGrath’s struggle for form earlier in the season has been well documented, but despite overcoming that post-Lions dip, he has still spent the majority of this Six Nations campaign watching from the sidelines, given the form of the revitalised Healy.
So far, McGrath has had to make do with a 19-minute cameo against France, 68 minutes from the start against Italy and a 16-minute run-out in the win over Wales.
It is a frustrating situation, given the hard work the prop has endured in getting through his early-season struggles, and McGrath admits that after a combination of poor form and injuries resulted in a disappointing November series, he knew he had serious ground to make up ahead of the Six Nations.
‘He [Schmidt] didn’t really say a whole lot, so it was more like a tap on the back and, “Get right, and we’ll see how you go for the Six Nations”.
‘I just came in a little bit undercooked [in November] and I just didn’t have enough game time and [other] lads had and were playing well. It’s behind me now but it was a learning curve and sometimes the hardest lessons are the best ones.’
Still, the 28-year-old insists that even though he could see himself sliding down the pecking order, he was always confident of getting back to the levels that saw him installed as Schmidt’s first choice for the previous three Six Nations campaigns.
‘I’m experienced enough now to know that I can get to the highest level,’ he continues.
‘When it happened, everyone was saying to me that it happens to the best of them, so don’t worry, in time you’ll come back to where you were and I feel like I am getting there and we’re hitting good form, and it’s just being able to get the best out of myself and produce it for the team.’
Of course, it is not just the loosehead position where Schmidt finds himself spoilt for choice, as the hamstring injury Tadhg Furlong sustained against Italy allowed McGrath’s Leinster teammate Andrew Porter to step in and show, despite his lack of experience, he is up to the task at Test level.
It has been a similar story for the likes of Dan Leavy and James Ryan, and McGrath admits that while it’s a reassuring development, given how injuries cost Ireland at the 2015 World Cup, it’s also necessary when you consider how the game has changed in recent years.
‘It’s much more attritional and you do need a lot of players, a lot of depth and it’s showing, key guys have gone down since that World Cup [in 2015] when we lost those five guys and others have stepped up and there has been no drop-off. That’s what we want every time, a conveyor belt of players in all positions.’
Porter’s rapid rise after switching from loosehead to tighthead has received plenty of coverage over the last few weeks, and McGrath explains that even when the 22-year-old was trying to break through at loosehead with Leinster, he always felt a switch was on the cards.
‘I just thought that he was probably the right shape and the right height [for tighthead]. You could nearly see it happening with the way it was at Leinster with Cian, Porter, Ed [Byrne] when he was getting back and myself, it would have been tough and they really liked Porter and wanted to play him.’
Looking towards this weekend, McGrath acknowledges that while Ireland are well placed going into their final two fixtures, the concession of three tries against both Italy and Wales is a stark reminder that improvement will be needed if they are to get past a reinvigorated Scotland.
‘There’s always improvements in all aspects of our games, so we’ve been working on them for Scotland, because we know how dangerous they are. Like Italy and Wales, their attacking threat is always there and if one person gets one thing wrong, they exploit it.
‘That’s pretty much what happened [in the last two games], a few people got a few things wrong, they showed up a few frailties there but we’ll fix them and we know we have to be extra sharp against Scotland because we saw the tries they scored against England and they’ve beaten Australia twice and ran New Zealand close.
‘We know we have to be really sharp on both sides of the ball because they’re flying high.’