Murray backs Best to stamp his authority again
O’Mahony fronts up to Twickenham horror show
CONOR MURRAY insists the Ireland squad have full faith in Rory Best ahead of the World Cup, despite the veteran captain’s heavily criticised performance in the 57-15 hammering by England last weekend. Not for the first time, Best’s lineout throwing was identified as a major problem as Ireland’s setpiece disintegrated in the Twickenham sun. Ireland play two more warm-up games against Wales, the first of which takes place in Cardiff this weekend, before heading to Japan, and Murray has backed the 37-year-old Best to rediscover some form in time for the World Cup, which kicks off for Ireland with their pool opener against Scotland on September 22. ‘The lineout’s not just down to the hooker,’ said Murray. ‘Rory is a guy who is an incredibly strong character. He’s leading this week incredibly strongly, he’s obviously at the forefront of this as our captain and wants to put it right, he’s leading us into this game. ‘You’ve seen them in meetings with the hookers, lineout callers, lineout jumpers and trying to figure out what went wrong because it usually is such a solid platform for us. When
THERE has been nowhere to hide around the corridors of Carton House in recent days. The post-match inquests into that 57-15 debacle in Twickenham have been unforgiving. The Monday morning video review was particularly uncomfortable and the subsequent team meetings have been equally taxing.
This squad is hurting right now and a big reaction is expected in the coming days. Judging by Peter O’Mahony’s demeanour, Ireland look primed to take out their frustrations on the Welsh this Saturday.
It’s put to the Munster flanker — who is set to captain the squad in Cardiff this weekend — that Schmidt described the performance against England as an ‘aberration’?
‘What do you mean by an aberration now? Explain that to me,’ he says with that customary Cork directness.
It’s explained that the boss felt the display was a once-off, a freak performance that should never be repeated. O’Mahony takes it all in before nodding.
‘Yeah, I’d agree. Look, it’s not a performance that we are going to be proud of. We’re lucky that we have incredible support and we had a lot of people travel and who live in London — we let them down, we let our supporters down.
‘But we know there is lots of stuff there that we can fix ourselves.
‘We got a harsh reality check over video analysis sessions over the last couple of days.
‘We’re certainly not going to standing here and make excuses. It was a poor, poor performance.
‘We have spent two days looking at it and building for something that we can hang our jerseys on on Saturday.’
Is he confident it will be better against Warren Gatland’s men?
‘Well it has to be better,’ he retorts.
Schmidt knew his players were heading to London to face a fullytion. loaded English side tuned up from two big encounters with Wales, but even Ireland’s meticulous head coach could not have foreseen the shambles that would unfold last Saturday.
It has had quite a sobering effect on this squad, but O’Mahony was quick to point out that there is little time for people to feel sorry for themselves.
‘It’s a record defeat. It’s not something that we are used to. We know that you take the 24 hours and you feel sorry for yourself, but the beauty of this game is that you have another one this weekend.
‘Whoever gets selected this weekend has a huge, huge responsibility to put the green jersey back in a good place.
‘You can’t come in on Monday morning and be laughing and joking, pretending nothing has happened. You have to put your head down and heads together, which is the most important thing to sort things out.
‘We had two good days of doing that. We have drawn a line under that now and we’ll kick on now to Wales.’
The optimists in Irish rugby have been quick to peddle the argument that this run of poor results will serve Ireland well in Japan for they will not be suffering with the weight of expecta‘Look we don’t see it that way,’ says O’Mahony. ‘They’re Test matches. You hear people saying, “oh maybe it’s a good thing”.
‘It’s not a good thing to lose a game like that. We’re not going to bull **** ourselves by saying, “that might be the best things for us”.
‘That’s not the best thing for us. But as you said it wasn’t a World Cup game, we’ve time, we can sort it.
‘It is certainly better that it happened now but that’s kind of a bull **** saying as well, we’re not going around trying to claim it.’
It’s been back to work on the training ground in recent days. Back in the glory days of Munster, the likes of Paul O’Connell would tell you that a good dust-up on the paddock would do wonders for a demoralised squad.
The game has moved on from those old-school skirmishes on the back pitches in Limerich, however.
‘In the old days, you would have gone out and belted each other around the place but we can’t afford to do that these days,’ O’Mahony explains.
‘You’re going to get guys injured. There is an emphasis on things certainly that we’ve picked out that we want to see a big change in training but I’m not going to come out and tell you we kicked lumps out of each other in training, we didn’t.
‘You can’t do that. We went out, we had two good, clear rugby sessions, we got through a lot of work and fixed a lot of things which was important for us,’ stresses O’Mahony.
Here’s hoping, as the boss proclaimed, that it was just a blip.
The lineout and the defence are too obvious quick fixes, but Ireland need to show some signs of life before they board that flight to Tokyo on September 11.
‘You’ve got to see us all at Test match level and Test match pace and I think we were off the pace, both sides of the ball, at the weekend,’ he adds.
‘You’ve got to see an Irish team at the pace we want to play with and make it difficult for Wales.’
“We let down
our supporters. It was very poor” “Watching the match video was a reality check”