Unsettling day does not reflect well on leaders

THIS was a strange kind of glory. As the fists were pumped at the final whistle, and as the commentators let rip with the kind of yahooing best kept for Cheltenham and closing time on St Patrick’s Day, it seemed as if the preceding hour and a half had all the substance of spilled porter.

England were routed, Ireland had the bonus point, the chariots were off the road again.

Now bring on Cheltenham and the next rousing Irish victory!

Winning by 17 points perhaps invites a giddiness that can be overpowering. But even those mainlining paddywhackery must have felt uneasy at the final whistle of this bizarre match.

The fact is that Ireland were, for the great majority of this game, poor, sometimes abject.

England played 78 and a half minutes of regulation time with 14 players, and faced with that towering disadvantage, they resorted to a rudimentary up-and-under style that very nearly carried the day.

The Irish team just about survived this analogue onslaught. This side were brilliant in dismantling New Zealand four months ago but barely thought their way around a desperate, defiant rival that in the end succumbed to exhaustion before eventually succumbing to their opponents.

Ireland’s scrum collapsed, stirring old ghosts of awful afternoons at this ground, but also pinpointing enormous worries for Andy Farrell about the quality of Ireland’s frontrow cover.

Leadership was palpably deficient, and at times it looked absent. This, in turn, should demand scrutiny of the team selected, but also of some of the players on which Farrell is building plans for the next World Cup.

Johnny Sexton’s difficulties were disquieting. His contract extension was celebrated as a good news story during the week, but he struggled badly yesterday.

Some of those problems were not of his making, but they stemmed from the scrum dysfunction and the general inferiority of the Irish forwards, for the second time in this championship.

But even with those disadvantages acknowledged, Sexton struggled to plot a way through the English conundrum. This was an occasion that demanded the controlling input of senior players, veterans who can spread the message to take a breath, simplify and wait England out.

It was obvious that they would blow themselves out, that their magnificent defiance would diminish as the game wore on and exhaustion bit.

But Ireland continued to make mistakes, rush passes, take wrong decisions, and the captain must bear a significant part of the responsibility for that.

He wasn’t the only one. Peter O’Mahony was a surprise selection but this looked a challenge too far.

The all-Leinster back row that Farrell has favoured for much of the last year is clearly his best. Iain Henderson is a player who has won 66 caps and who we are still waiting to arrive at this level.

He came on here after a minute and 22 seconds for the stricken, desperately unfortunate James

Ryan, and he was poor thereafter. He conceded penalties and made too many heedless, undisciplined decisions.

The decision to pick him in the 23 ahead of Ryan Baird was the wrong one, and the evidence was stretched out over many agonising minutes in London.

Ireland conceded 15 penalties and 16 turnovers, and their glut of errors led to scrum after scrum. Each fresh one must have found the stomachs of Cian Healy, Dan Sheehan and Tadhg Furlong tightening a little more.

England had seven forwards in the set-piece, supplemented by the winger Jack Nowell, but they won six scrum penalties in a row and left the Irish unit battered, dispirited and humiliated.

Furlong is properly celebrated as a world-class talent, but Ellis Genge haunted him and celebrated each penalty with a predictable, forceful obviousness.

The difficulties of Healy and Sheehan are more worrying, as they were covering the absences of Andrew Porter and Ronan Kelleher, two outstanding players.

The thinness of the cover for them will, one fears, become a recurring concern for Farrell. Meanwhile the word will go out from this trauma: go after the Irish scrum.

And when the front row is not comprised of Porter, Kelleher and Furlong, rivals are justified in that ambition.

There is a distasteful strain of thinking that argues the game was ruined by the decision of Mathieu Raynal, the referee, to send off Charlie Ewels for his high, late tackle on Ryan.

That argument needs no entertaining. Nobody should have sympathy for Ewels. The commitment of the rugby authorities to tackling concussion may be subject to scrutiny, but in recent years there has been a consistently stringent attitude taken to high tackles of this kind.

Ewels was reckless, but it was disconcerting to see him painted almost as a victim.

The TV replays showed a shocked player walking off the pitch, with his team-mates tapping him on the head in consolation.

James Ryan walked off before Ewels, remember, with another head injury and all the worry that entails for a player too familiar with those issues, and a dribble of blood down his chin. There was only one victim after this incident, and it wasn’t the aggressor.

Ewels’ team-mates did their damnedest to make up for his indiscipline, but they could not sustain the effort; no team could. But in their effort, they left a legacy that will stand to England more than any good Ireland take from this game.

Wave the shamrocks if you must, but this was an unnerving triumph.