IT’S JOE GRAND

Schmidt says Slam would be special but title’s the main goal

WATCHING from afar in his Clermont home, it wasn’t lost on Joe Schmidt what winning the Grand Slam meant to Ireland in 2009.

A year later he could totally relate as the French club clinched the Top 14 championship for the first time.

For Ireland, it was only the second time in their history that they had achieved the feat.

The first had come 61 years before. Next month, serial winner Schmidt could pick up the third championship title of his five-year reign.

It could happen at home to England’s conquerors Scotland on Saturday week or at Twickenham on St Patrick’s Day.

But he understands why everybody else in Ireland has got Grand Slam fever after the opening three wins over France, Italy and Wales.

The Kiwi grinned: “Yeah, I probably don’t fall into that ‘everybody’ thing because Jeez, I’d love to just win a championship, you know?

“But the Grand Slam is super special, especially here. I witnessed 2009 from a distance. I was living in Clermont but I saw how people reacted, what it meant to people. When you’ve only had two of them people talk about it because what is rare is beautiful, you want it to happen massively.

“It would be fantastic if that was something we managed to do. But for us it would be really special if we managed to get three championships in five years.

“That would be an incredible representation of the consistency at the very top level of Europe. You throw in a few of the southern hemisphere results and it’s been an exciting time for some of these players to really test themselves.

“But these next two games, they just get bigger and bigger don’t they?

“Scotland are on that upward spiral. We’re at home, in Dublin, we know the reality that if we can get the result there then other people have to do something special to stop us from getting the championship.

“It’s a massive short-term focus for us but for Scotland it is as well.

“They know that if they get a result here, they go to Rome with what would be a massive result for them in the context of how they’ve built over the last two or three years from Vern Cotter through to Gregor Townsend.”

Despite the prospect of what’s ahead, Schmidt insists there is no discussion within the Ireland camp of a glorious finale to an already thrilling campaign after the last-gasp heroics against France and Wales.

Instead, much of their focus is on the worrying defensive lapses that have seen

Ireland cough up seven tries to date.

Giving his backing to the “world class” defence coach Andy Farrell, Schmidt added: “We know we won’t win the championship unless we can make sure that we are good on both sides of the ball, even in the air.

“We wouldn’t talk in terms of the championship, we talk in terms of what Scotland did at the weekend that we need to be wary of, what we can do better to try and stress them.

“In a purely pragmatic sense, that’s all that we can really control or influence. “Whatever the championship outcome ends up being, we know what we’d love it to be but it’s not something that we can control. Therefore that’s a distraction that we don’t need to focus upon. For us, it’s what can we do better.”