SHAKEN... NOT STIRRED
We got far more tension than we were expecting on a strange day at the Aviva
FROM the vantage point of a vanquished Marseille seven weeks ago, a championship ending as tense and tossed by doubt as this one was entirely unforeseeable. But Ireland were shaken mightily here, not so much by marauding visitors as their own vulnerabilities. They held on. They defended their title. It wasn’t easily earned and it’s fully deserved.
But this fragility sent the evening spiralling into tension that was not easily foreseen – and which had very little to do with anything the Scots did.
For three-quarters of a game tautened by pressure, there was little of the friction these two rivals are said to produce.
That changed as Ireland got on top and Scotland resorted to empty shaping and hollow posturing.
Finn Russell was never far from referee Matthew Carley, complaining about Irish offences that only he seemed to detect.
Russell talks far too much for a captain, complaining like a neurotic neighbour about slights, mostly imagined. Carley indulged him to an inexplicable degree here, but it heightened the suspicion that this is a talented Scottish generation who are still some way off the force that they believe themselves to be.
That can’t be as easily said of Ireland, but there are many who throughout this championship have made bold claims on their behalf. The most daring is that they are the best team in the world – and it’s the most easily refuted, too.
They are neither ranked there, nor are they world champions, and the team that holds both of those honours will have spent weeks fattening on what has been said in the name of the Irish team.
Redemption is a loaded word, given what it implies about what happened in Twickenham seven days earlier.
But if this is a side with designs on a Grand Slam, and a team so consistently good that July’s twoTest tour to South Africa is already exciting the dementedly passionate Springbok support, then there were sizeable wrongs to right.
It perhaps needs repeating that there has been nobody within the Irish squad talking big on their behalf, and the anger directed towards pundits such as Jamie Heaslip and Peter Stringer for demeaning England has been overplayed.
Pundits willing to make brazen claims are playing a part, and have their place in the pageantry. A game entirely deadened by stats and illustrative clips holds no appeal.
This is a squad nonetheless entitled to rate itself highly, but it looked at times here as if losing by a point eight days ago, in an exhilarating contest, had stuffed them with doubt.
How redemptive this performance was is debatable, then, because for most of it Ireland played like a chastened team.
It was as if the tremendous English onslaught made the players second-guess old certainties.
The errors that blighted that defeat were not as much in evidence, or as costly, but that’s also because Scotland couldn’t apply the same sort of pressure.
Yet Ireland were still favouring certainty over risk, leaving so little to chance that it reduced much of the game to a tight, intense stalemate.
Maybe it was an inevitable overcorrection after what had happened in London, but it kept Scotland in the game despite an unremarkable performance.
That they were never out of it is less a testament to them than an exposure of unfamiliar flaws in the Irish game that were absent in Marseille in round one. The main consequence was a game that felt restricted, with knock-on effects on the wider attendance, too. Donncha O’Callaghan used to be famed as the team’s entertainer. Now he’s doing it for a living and was the pre-match noise-maker here.
He’s more usually pitchside as an analyst, and it serves him better. It’s a feature of every big sporting set-piece now, and it doesn’t work well in Croke Park or the Aviva Stadium, irrespective of the code.
But the unwillingness among organisers to trust supporters to create an atmosphere themselves seems rigid, and that lack of faith is a particular feature of Test rugby matches in this country.
It has spawned a debate on radio, in letters’ pages and in the other corners of polite society where disquiet is made manifest.
It’s a topic that is both hilarious – on account of the high-mindedness and the competing views held in deadly earnestness – and also relevant.
Because it is a fact that many people spend the entire game trooping in and out of the various bars, returning with provisions that would make a pack mule wince.
It ruins it for everyone in their vicinity, but nobody seems to complain at the time. That’s reserved for later.
Given the fortune it costs to attend a big sports occasion now, the annoyance some feel is understandable, as is the bewilderment of those who ask why, say, a Sunday or early Saturday kick-off is treated with dread, because it’s assumed fans won’t make enough noise if they’re not full to the gills with over-priced beer.
But by the final quarter here, as Scotland repelled extensive Irish pressure to stay within four points, the atmosphere was taut. When Garry Ringrose knocked on in that sequence, the noise whistled out of the ground. When the same player pounced on a loose ball and made a terrific break minutes later, it set the place ablaze once more.
When Ireland finally battered over for their second try, Andrew Porter fizzing through the bedraggled blue ranks like a popped cork, the roars could have served as relieved sighs.
It was fully deserved; Ireland played all of the rugby and showed much the greater nous and ambition, yet it wasn’t until Porter’s score and Jack Crowley’s conversion to put 11 points between the sides, that the tension eased.
And it was only then that a match most had presumed would be a restorative outing after the shock of a week ago, felt like it.
Harry Byrne’s yellow card with four and a half minutes left was obvious, and it sent a late tremor through a side frazzled by Huw Jones’ try a minute later.
Ireland held on to end up as champions, a tribute to their talent but also their unflagging application.
But for the second time in a week, a gimme became something much more slippery. It could simply have been one of those weeks, and this is a side entitled to the benefit of the doubt.
All of a sudden, though, strange vulnerabilities stalk the champions.
‘IRELAND WERE STILL FAVOURING CERTAINTY OVER RISK’