[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]D[/su_dropcap]on’t let the scoreboard fool you into thinking that this was an 11 point win. We were beaten up in Twickenham on Saturday afternoon. It was an 11 point trashing. If such a thing exists, it is this game. England were content to cough up 68% possession to us and 72% territory because they believed we had nothing for them with the ball in hand.
They were right.
Andy Farrell was quick to point out how proud he was of his players in the aftermath of this defeat, which I can totally get behind. Aside from anything else, his players showed up for work against a bruising English pack and ran into them without hesitation for 80 minutes, forcing the English into 230+ tackles. That is to their credit but, in another way, it’s also a rod for their back because it looked like we could have been out there carrying ball through the forwards until midnight and not made a dent.
To illustrate, our starting pack carried the ball 71 times into the English forward line and made a combined 66 metres. Those numbers aren’t the be-all and end-all, but they tell a small part of the story of this game.
At points in the first half, I was reminded of the ending to the book 1984.
“Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever”
This sequence, in particular, stood out to me as an illustration of England’s collision dominance. There isn’t any point in pulling my yellow circle over 100MB of Ireland losing collision after collision. It’s all right here in this example.
Yeah, Ireland win a collision here and there but mostly it’s Irish guys getting double tackled, slowed in contact and ultimately producing easily defendable, mono-option ball in the face of punishing English defence.
Imagine a white jersey tackling a green jersey— forever.
But even then, this kind of possession wouldn’t have been that much of an issue and would have actively played into our overall aims had we been accurate, or even passable, at the set-piece and the lineout specifically.
Check out this opportunity that came off the back of a solid scrum launch.
That was an excellent carry from Aki – one of the few strong first phase efforts we managed to produce – and it resulted in an English defensive compression AND quick ball. We needed Gibson-Park to find Byrne on the posts left side of the ruck with Keenan and Lowe lurking in the wider channels.
Instead, Gibson-Park ran into Ollie Lawrence and Tom Curry. He was turned over soon after. I get what Gibson-Park was trying to do here – he ascended to the starting XV for this game off the back of building pace and tempo into Ireland’s phase play – but the smart play was releasing to Byrne so we could attack where England weren’t defending, for once.
But you can see the principle of play – solid set-piece launch gives our big midfield a chance to impact England where we have a size advantage.
Had we managed this with our lineout possession, this could and should have been a tighter contest.
The first instinct is often to blame the hooker when a lineout goes wrong because they are often the player with the most active role. They throw the ball, after all, and when they don’t hit the jumper it’s easy to class it as a “miss”. That can be true on some throws and not others. Sometimes it’s the actual scheme of the lineout that’s wrong and sometimes it can be the opposition contesting heavily in certain positions. It’s frustrating because it’d be way easier for a lineout malfunction to be down to one guy that could be easily swapped out, as opposed to a complex series of actions going wrong at different stages.
These two lineouts look like an overthrow (and they are, technically) but I think the main issue a blown back lift by Ryan and Roux on both occasions that prevent the jumper from hitting the apex coupled with a slightly early throw.
But is this all the lifters and jumper’s fault? No – these can be as much about the scheme itself as it is about the mechanics. These two lineouts have the same base design in that they are a pendulum decoy – a jump that feints the jump on a back movement before going up on a forward movement – and for me, the main issue is that we’re not getting our jumper into the air to the level that is needed.
These lineouts, on the other hand, look too static and poorly designed. The throw was exactly what it needed to be on these examples but they were thrown into heavily contested areas that England didn’t have to work too hard to occupy.
Were these poorly called lineouts from a tactical perspective – the right scheme at the wrong time – or are the base schemes themselves efficient enough to throw a defensive lineout with only two designated counter-jumpers off our launch points?
That malfunctioning lineout meant the one area where we might have been expecting a physical advantage evaporated into nothing. As a result, almost everything we ran on our subsequent phases was narrow, slow and consistently into the teeth of the English defence.
Some of that comes down to Ross Byrne’s performance at #10 which I think would have been quite a good performance if Ireland had been winning our forward collisions. Almost all of his action as our first receiver was focused on shipping the ball outside to look for width.
I understand his behaviour here because I think he instinctively knows that we needed width to stretch out the English defence but his eagerness to move the ball on eventually translated into the English wide defence completely ignoring Byrne and shooting into the offensive line outside him.
The first example in the above compilation is a good illustration of Byrne’s general behaviour on good gainline/quick ball and no gainline/slow ball – exactly the same.
This had the effect of leading English defenders onto the Irish outside attackers on almost every occasion.
Byrne only challenged the gainline twice during his 68 minutes.
You can see how it created space when he attacked the line before passing through a split two pod – Aki could work his way into space and Farrell made a good gain out wide – but it just didn’t happen often enough, for me.
We would have seen more movement from Sexton but I think it’s fair to say that Ross Byrne doesn’t really have a whole lot of experience playing behind a pack that isn’t winning collisions and I think that showed here. If you aren’t winning collisions, the #10 has to help create positive numbers on the outside by committing defenders centrally. What you don’t want is to be leading the defence onto your runners.
On this example, Murray slung a massive pass out to Farrell to try to generate some momentum off an infield maul but by the time we reset to Byrne, we’re being running three English defenders onto three Irish attackers and it comes to nothing.
It’s not Ross Byrne’s fault we lost here. It’s not Jamison Gibson-Park’s fault either. I think we can now see that the noise around Sexton and Murray as recently as last week was misplaced too. Until we sort out our issues in our forward ball-carrying rotation and lineout and, as a result, our attacking shape this game and its outcome will be the new reality against England, France and probably South Africa and New Zealand too.
Notable Players
This was a poor collective performance. With almost 70% possession and 140 rucks, I expect a lot of Ireland’s players to rack up big numbers at the offensive breakdown but how much of that work was effective in winning collision points in a way that produced workable momentum? Not enough.
I thought this was comfortably CJ Stander’s worst game in an Irish shirt from purely an effectiveness and involvement perspective. I expected his switch to the side of the scrum to have a minimal effect on his role but his involvements on-ball dipped considerably and found it difficult to impact the game in a positive way.
James Lowe was running at a below-average two-star performance because for much of the contest the game bypassed him. A lot of that came down to poor work happening at first receiver but he dipped down to a one-star for me after this lack of effort on a chase back.
Would he have stopped the break? Maybe not. But, for me, how you react in moments like these show your teammates how much it means to you and I can’t compute how Ronan Kelleher, Quinn Roux and Peter O’Mahony beat him to the chase despite running back from deeper positions. Whatever about anything else, that alone isn’t even close to good enough.
This was the latest in what is becoming a sequence of below-par James Ryan performances. A lot of the chat before the game was about how this game was going to be a battle between future test Lions second row partners; Ryan vs Itoje. I don’t think that’s an adequate comparison on the evidence of this game because if we look at this 80 minutes in isolation, Maro Itoje is operating on a level above Ryan and, in fairness, most other second-rows playing the game in 2020.
Ryan is still producing decent numbers carrying the ball and he’s certainly working hard but he’s struggled to impose himself against France and now England over the last month and for a guy long labelled as the next Irish captain, I want to see more. Is it that he returned from shoulder surgery a little early? In some ways, I hope that is the case because, for me, Ryan’s effectiveness in big games against elite opposition at test level has not progressed in line with expectation over the last two seasons. Does he need a tweak in his role to focus on one particular role set? Right now it seems like we want him to be our lineout caller and primary jump target, a primary ball carrier, a tighthead lock scrummager, a defensive leader, an offensive ruck monster AND our captain for the next 10 years.
Maro Itoje is important to England but even he is not that important.
Andy Farrell was proud of Caelan Doris after this game and I can see why. Doris is still only 22 years of age but he showed up for punishment on-ball for the full 80 minutes. He wasn’t that effective – few were – but he won a few turnovers and showed real toughness on the ball and in defence. I have suspicions that he might be slightly undersized for test level at the moment but when he sorts that, he looks like a real prospect.
Chris Farrell should have scored in the second half and got badly stung on May’s second try but he turned it around by being out most effective ball carrier in the second half.
Andrew Porter was one of the standouts for me in the pack. He scrummaged relatively well but really showed up in contact with a bruising performance where he ate double tackle after double tackle and kept going for 80 minutes.
Peter O’Mahony was my standout performer on a poor day for Ireland overall.
It wasn’t earth-shattering stuff. He showed the same toughness as Doris in contact but had a decent game in the wider channels when the ball found him while being a primary lineout target. On a day when most of our forwards struggled to impact the game, O’Mahony showed that there’s a lot more in the tank than many gave him credit for. Wherever we go from here, I think O’Mahony has shown that he is still a valuable component at test level.
The Wally Ratings: England (A)
The Wally Ratings explainer page is here.
Players are rated based on their time on the pitch, if they were playing notably out of position, and on the overall curve of the team performance. DNP means the player did not feature and N/A means they weren’t on the pitch long enough to warrant a fair rating.
| Names | Rating |
|---|---|
| Cian Healy | ★★ |
| Ronan Kelleher | ★★ |
| Andrew Porter | ★★★ |
| Quinn Roux | ★ |
| James Ryan | ★ |
| CJ Stander | ★ |
| Peter O'Mahony | ★★★ |
| Caelan Doris | ★★ |
| Jamison Gibson-Park | ★★ |
| Ross Byrne | ★ |
| James Lowe | ★ |
| Bundee Aki | ★★ |
| Chris Farrell | ★★ |
| Keith Earls | ★★★ |
| Hugo Keenan | ★★★ |
| Rob Herring | ★★★ |
| Finlay Bealham | N/A |
| John Ryan | DNP |
| Iain Henderson | ★★★ |
| Will Connors | ★★★ |
| Conor Murray | ★★★ |
| Billy Burns | ★★★ |
| Jacob Stockdale | ★★★ |
