BACK TO BASICS
Ireland did a lot right in 2023 but the set-piece has to be sorted before they take the next step
IT WILL soon be the three-year anniversary of a press release dropping into a frazzled world. On January 7, 2021, Ireland was still a place of masks, restrictions and oppressive fear. Ireland fans were facing into another closed-door Six Nations, and fresh trials for Andy Farrell as his uncertain adjustment to the head coach role continued.
The news which dropped that January morning was a big surprise, announcing Paul O’Connell’s addition to the Irish coaching team as forwards coach.
He was inexperienced, having worked briefly in France and in the Munster academy, and had drawn praise for his work with the Irish Under 20s.
Simon Easterby moved to defence as O’Connell took charge of the pack, and the impression he made was instant. The players immediately took to him, especially lineout leader James Ryan.
The O’Connell effect was manifested in the vital nuts and bolts of an improved line-out, but it also helped Farrell achieve a working balance in his support staff.
There was cautious optimism that Farrell’s project was starting to hang together more convincingly, and it found brilliant expression in the final Six Nations game of 2021, when England were hammered at Aviva Stadium.
From that day to the loss to New Zealand in a World Cup semi-final last October, Ireland barely put a foot wrong.
The aftermath of a World Cup provides an obvious time for a reset. And amid news that the head coach has committed to the Irish job through to the conclusion of the 2027 tournament, planning for the upcoming Six Nations will draw heavily on Ireland’s experiences in France through a triumphant September until coming up short against the All Blacks.
And those conversations could have O’Connell shifting uneasily in his seat. Alongside him, scrum coach John Fogarty could also be running a finger around his collar. Because the areas of Ireland’s game in most pressing need of improvement based on the World Cup, and given some of the provincial travails since the start of the new club season, are the setpieces.
The scrum creaked alarmingly on occasion in France, a reminder that Ireland’s excellence since the breakthrough of Tadhg Furlong was an exceptional period in the precise sense of the word.
He has struggled with injury in recent seasons, and much more profound personal challenges following the serious illness that resulted in his father’s recent death.
More prosaically, he has been an elitelevel prop for the guts of a decade, and in the modern game, service of that nature takes a toll.
Furlong is young enough to soldier on through to the next World Cup — he turned 31 in November — but the lack of depth at prop, compared to the world’s other leading teams, is a pervasive issue. Finlay Bealham has been outstanding under Farrell, and is good enough to seriously challenge Furlong for his place. But after him, the conversation turns to either untested alternatives or radical interventions like moving Andrew Porter back across to tighthead. This angst around the scrum is nothing new. It’s simply that the brilliance of Furlong dispelled it for years. Now it is returning, not with the force of that wretched day in Twickenham in 2012, when England ransacked a retreating Ireland pack for penalty after penalty, but with enough insistence in provincial matches to suggest it will be a dominant issue for Farrell in preparations for the championship kick-off against France on February 2. The manner in which Munster suffered against Bayonne’s starting props, and then their replacements, was one recent vivid example — part of that team’s wider setpiece issues just now.
Leinster, as in every other facet of the game, are the one province rising above those difficulties, but not so well that scrum concerns are left in the distance.
As with the national team, there are a handful of opponents good enough and big enough to squeeze them in the tight, and finding ways to cope with that is the trick.
It was heartening to see their pragmatism in beating La Rochelle on that sodden Sunday a fortnight ago, refusing to delay at scrumtime, getting in and out with as much efficiency as possible.
This was partly due to the absence of Furlong, but it also harked back to coping mechanisms deployed by good Irish teams of the past, that did not have immovable rocks like Furlong or Mike Ross to anchor the scrum.
The La Rochelle deluge also showcased a competent outing for the Leinster line-out. This again has enormous Test repercussions, given the centrality of James Ryan to both teams’ units.
Ryan was one of the relatively few Irish players to have a difficult time in France. It seemed clear from Farrell’s explanations that his demotion for the Scotland game was not a fitness issue. The later emergence of the wrist injury that kept him out of contention for the quarter-final complicated matters, but the widespread belief that Ryan had been demoted was nourished by how he had toiled in earlier games, including against the Springboks.
The world champions put the Irish line-out under immense pressure in that game, ripping it apart early on.
New Zealand also eked out advantages there, and this is more worrying than the scrum difficulties, because it has been such a strength of the Irish game under O’Connell’s tutelage.
While he tried to dilute concerns around the line-out at his recent media outing, David Nucifora, the outgoing performance director, had to concede that it was an issue, preferring the term ‘challenge’ in describing recent travails.
As the caller, Ryan is an obvious focus of scrutiny, as is the hooker, with Ronan Kelleher looking less than assured as he deputised for Dan Sheehan until the latter returned for the clash with Scotland.
Wherever the problems exactly lay, they were not adequately solved during the competition, and it’s reasonable to assume that finding solutions has consumed Farrell and O’Connell.
With Nucifora confirming the departure of Mike Catt at the end of this season and Andrew Goodman taking his place, the Irish coaching staff will get another shake in the coming months.
The new arrival will face nothing like the transition that must have confronted O’Connell.
This is a settled, proven coaching ticket, and while exiting the World Cup in the last eight constituted nothing less than failure, it was failure of a heavily qualified sort.
Ireland lost an exceptional match to a New Zealand team that touched its previous levels of greatness, and this after the epic win against South Africa and the annihilation of Scotland.
They are the reigning Six Nations champions after taking the title last spring with a Grand Slam, while a mouth-watering tour of South Africa awaits in July.
There is a great deal going well in the Irish game. But it is deficiencies and how they are exploited that tend to decide the biggest matches.
Pressures of the domestic calendar mean there will be no training groups assembled under Farrell’s watch this side of January.
Sport moves incessantly on, with new goals, fresh ambitions, and eager contenders.
But some old problems lurk in the half-light.
How they are addressed will end up determining just how Ireland react to the ups and downs they endured last season.
They put the Irish line-out under immense pressure, ripping it apart early on