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Four talking points as Ireland limit another TRC team to one try
By Liam Heagney reporting from Dublin
Andy Farrell wasn’t getting caught up in the general doom and gloom that hung in the air at his final media briefing on Saturday evening as Ireland head coach until deep into 2025 when his sabbatical in charge of the British and Irish Lions has ended.
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He of course acknowledged that there were plenty of issues which would need addressing, namely the amount of sloppy errors in Ireland’s bungled attack play. Publicly turning a blind eye to that repeat inaccuracy would be him not doing his job honestly.
However, having just finished an 11-game calendar year with an eighth victory, the Englishman wasn’t surrendering himself to the prevailing sense of pessimism. “We’ll celebrate the autumn and Cian Healy’s 134th-cap and the IRFU’s 150th-anniversary well tonight and what tomorrow will bring will bring,” he insisted. Proper order.
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Test rugby is a results business and winning – no matter how ugly – is the currency that matters. Just ask England boss Steve Borthwick, whose team came out the wrong side of the ledger in its three big Autumn Nations Series games.
Ireland, in sharp contrast, had a win by a replica 22-19 scoreline over Australia to add to their successful three-point wrestle with Argentina. With a rout of Fiji also banked, three wins from four can’t be considered a negative outcome.
Yes, there are numerous fix ups required, and we will address a number of them below, but Ireland’s stubbornness not to roll over following the series-opening deflation against New Zealand was a positive despite the widespread criticism of their level of performance. Here are the RugbyPass talking points following the three-point comeback success over the Wallabies.
This turnover thing
We were busy scouring this website’s match centre on the Saturday night spin away from Aviva Stadium. The colossal figure of 23 turnovers in possession was the largest red flag when reflecting on the tense hold-on win… and it is now a trend in the Irish game, not a one-off.
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With Australia only giving up 16 turnovers, it was the fifth match in succession in which Ireland conceded more than the opposition (17-11 Fiji, 15-14 Argentina, 13-12 New Zealand and 18-12 South Africa).
Do the math and it’s a cumulative total of 86 Irish turnovers to the opposition’s 65. Quite the difference. It is why three of the four Irish wins in these last five games were by uncomfortable one-score margins.
That tension isn’t good for the nerves but better to be on the right side of the scoreboard than snookered as happened in the last-minute last March at Twickenham versus England.
“You take the positives of being in the right parts of the field,” suggested Farrell about where a major chunk of the turnovers happened versus the Wallabies. But what did go wrong?
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“Some of them were simple ball in hand and dropping them… a lot of them have been fancy, just not seeing the pass, just presuming that people are going to be there. So our timing was off a little bit.”
After five weeks together in this autumn block, Ireland should have been far better than that and timing shouldn’t have been the shackling issue that it was. Stern words need to be had after their night on the tiles.
A post-match word with the most capped Ireland player of all time! ?#TeamOfUs pic.twitter.com/onSEbSZHlV
— Irish Rugby (@IrishRugby) November 30, 2024
Mean defence
Take a bow, defence coach Simon Easterby. In four games against Rugby Championship opposition, Ireland conceded a miserly three tries.
The Springboks were held try-less in Durban last July while New Zealand, Argentina and now Australia were all limited to just a single try each this past month in Dublin. That’s excellent.
This solidity, though, hasn’t denied teams pilfering points in another way. A dozen of Australia’s 19 came from four penalty kicks, exactly the same as Argentina 15 days earlier.
Factor in how New Zealand had 18 points from six kicks and South Africa 24 points from eight kicks, that is a running total of 66 kicked points from 22 penalties. It is a level of damage that must be considered to be excessive but there is an alternative way of looking at it.
So solid is the Irish defence when it comes to defending the try line, the opposition could be said to be cutting their losses and taking points from the tee rather than look to unleash a try-seeking move from kicking penalties to touch or going for a scrum. That surely is a fine compliment to the meanness of the Irish rearguard.
Nearly going all the way!! Tupou's offload ?
? Live on @rugbyontnt ?#IREvAUS #AutumnNationsSeries #RUGBY pic.twitter.com/ucKa0acI27
— Autumn Nations Series (@autumnnations) November 30, 2024
Low Lowe and zippyless JGP
It was a good job that World Rugby held its fancy annual awards function last Sunday night in Monaco and not waited until the Autumn Nations Series was completely finished with this additional 150th-anniversary Ireland-Australia match.
If the ball was delayed a week so that all the fixtures were over, the names of James Lowe and Jamison Gibson-Park in the 2024 dream team XV would look odd given how poor they fared versus the Wallabies.
The flappy-handed Lowe headed up the individual Irish turnover count while the zippy Gibson-Park pass was absent as was his eye for cutting a sharp running line. With the scrum-half, you also have to wonder if having a rookie in Sam Prendergast outside him negatively impacted his level of play.
The pair would have had just 12 minutes together on the pitch before as a combination with Ireland, the latter part of the Argentina match, and while Prendergast had some contributions he could be pleased with against Australia, they weren’t a cohesive nine-10 partnership compared to the 14 momentum-shifting minutes Craig Casey and Jack Crowley spent together.
The latter are, of course, well used to each other from Munster but the same can’t be said of Prendergast and Gibson-Park at Leinster. With just nine weeks to go to the Guinness Six Nations clash with England, how many minutes they now get together at provincial level will be important. So far, they have had just the one appearance this season, the opening round URC win at Edinburgh.
?? With time running out, newly on the pitch Gus McCarthy comes up with the goods! Just in time! Game-winner Gus strikes for Ireland! ?
#breitling @breitling #definingmoment pic.twitter.com/QNanSyHPNA
— Autumn Nations Series (@autumnnations) November 30, 2024
Farewell Farrell
Saturday was Ireland’s 43rd win in 54 matches with Farrell at the helm since succeeding Joe Schmidt after Rugby World Cup 2019. That’s a whopping 79.6 per cent success rate which will heap a pile of expectation on interim head coach Easterby in the upcoming Six Nations.
Farrell humorously sounded annoyed with suggestion that he was ‘leaving’. “What do you mean I’m leaving? I live in Sandymount, I’m 10 minutes away, I’m not going anywhere,” he chuckled.
However, while he won’t be going anywhere in a domestic sense, IRFU HQ at No10 Lansdowne Road won’t be his office now that he will be working full-time with the British and Irish Lions ahead of their tour to Australia.
Farrell not being in the thick of it in Dublin with Ireland will be intriguing. Wales won the Six Nations title in 2013 with Rob Howley at the temporary helm when Warren Gatland was on a Lions sabbatical, but this became a fifth-place outcome four years later in 2017 when a similar handover happened.
Ireland’s well-being in Farrell’s absence will hinge on solutions being found to finesse their attack. Multi-faceted moves have shredded teams for the guts of two years but the sign-off feeling from this Autumn Nations Series is that the Irish have finally been worked out and their attacking unpredictability is over. In the end, it was the old reliable, the maul, that was the emergency go-to to see off Australia.
Go behind the scenes of both camps during the British and Irish Lions tour of South Africa in 2021. Binge watch exclusively on RugbyPass TV now
Happy to deliberately infringe to slow play is another way of framing the low try high penalty count. D not good enough to allow a lot of line breaks.