[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]T[/su_dropcap]he toughest part about this loss is that all the reason’s that people will focus on after the game – O’Mahony’s red card and Burns’ dead ball – should not have mattered when it came to the result. Ireland were more than good enough to win this game regardless of those individual errors but here we are, looking at a damaging loss all the same.

First, the red card.

It’s 100% a red card. I get what O’Mahony is looking to do – put the kind of physical marker down early in the game that helps set the tone of any big game – but he wasn’t cute enough in this instance. If Tipuric is slightly more committed to the breakdown, maybe this one doesn’t get noticed but as it was, it was a clear red card and we can have no complaints on the decision.

Ireland wobbled for a spell immediately after saw our deficit double to 6-0 in the 18th minute. Being down to 14 men with three-quarters of the game to play has an ominous ring to it but Ireland’s reaction after the kickoff set the tone for much of the rest of the game.

They forced a knock-on, launched off the scrum and then dominated Wales off #9 for large periods. It wasn’t that Ireland were jogging over the gainline – we weren’t – but our collision dominance off #9 was primarily demonstrated at the breakdown.

Look at the opportunity that our efficient breakdown recycling produced here – a wide overlap that just needed Henshaw getting the ball across his body a fraction quicker.

To illustrate, only 47% of our carries got over the gainline but 61% of our rucks were completed in under three seconds. Now, this could have been a ploy by the Welsh to maximise the number of defenders they had in the primary defensive against Ireland’s reduced numbers but when I look back through the game, I saw Wales consistently sending jackals after Ireland’s possession. This would suggest Wales were looking to draw Irish ruck support out of the attacking line to exaggerate the number’s disadvantage. If this is what they were doing, I would hesitate to call it successful.

Ireland consistently produced quick ball off our set up collisions off #9 and left so many opportunities on the field for the want of some accurate line running and handling in the second layer. Here are two in quick succession on the same attacking sequence.

The second one is more complex – I’d have liked Keenan to run an outside line to increase the positional drag on North. Ringrose had won the angle battle with Biggar – he’s outside his line with possession – and North would have no choice but to sit on the space if Keenan gives Ringrose a wider pass option.

Instead, we go for the short-ball option when Ringrose goes for the break inside North but that decision gives North options as long as Biggar gets across. You can see North getting hands on Keenan to prevent him from getting outside shoulder seperation so the chickenwing offload isn’t there for Ringrose.

That isn’t to say that short ball options out of contact can’t work – they absolutely can – and Ireland’s try was an excellent example. Collision dominance off #9 was central again. Van Der Flier punched up well off the lineout, Healy did a great job of creating a pocket for Beirne to run into by staggering Beard’s progression across the ruck and then produced lightning fast possession on the next ruck.

From there, Sexton set Henshaw running back against the grain heading towards the ruck the ball came from. That created a natural gap in the Welsh line for Henshaw to exploit and he used the space perfectly. Van Der Flier was right where he needed to be for the short ball offload. Healy’s cleanout on Owens was a crucial moment that opened up a lane for Beirne to finish.

Collision dominance and properly taken options in possession – it produced results regardless of the number disadvantage.

The second half was always going to be a challenge because Wales were always likely to have a good spell in possession so our management of those moments was going to be crucial. Our defensive scheme seemed to be based on hitting and then wiping across the contact point to open up jackal threats from Stander, Beirne, Henderson and Healy. We were broadly successful in this; we won four clean breakdown steals, limited Wales to just 46%  of their rucks being under 3 seconds, 30% was within 3-6 seconds and a whopping 24% of them were north of 6 seconds.

Ultimately it was our own errors that allowed Wales back into the game. Their first try came off the back of an Irish scrum. Admittedly, it was in a difficult part of the field to manage with an easy tactical decision as it was just outside the 22. If it had taken place a few metres closer, Ireland would have certainly exited straight off the field here but that wasn’t an option straight off the launch.

I think Ringrose does really well here in that he beats the Welsh blitz and goes straight for an easily resourceable spot – look at Van Der Flier and Stander hovering off the scrum. Ringrose gets a call from Sexton to offload out of contact and Ringrose obliges but the ball was knocked on. That was the first error for me – the call for the offload. It’s a little too low percentage for me in this instance and winning the contact point would have given more options. The second error was not killing the ball after Barnes called for a knock on.

From there, Ireland were scrambling in transition. Navidi’s offload took out three Irish defenders and left Lowe with a no-win situation on the outside. Hit on North and he leaves Halfpenny wide open for a finish in the corner – congrats, you “bit in” on defence. If Lowe drifts on North to cover the pass to Halfpenny – backing Henderson to make the tackle on North – and you risk North gliding right past you for the finish, which is exactly what happened.

Congrats, you just waved him through for the try. Who’d be a winger, eh?

Even with that setback, we still had the lead and were still producing opportunities through our collision point dominance;

Again, I’d look at our decision making off the second handler in this position; are we getting the most out of a non-Sexton back possession in this moment? There’s a very tight 3-1 overlap on the edge of the play here that we’re not going for.

This showed up repeatedly during the rest of the game;

We just don’t back the pass from Sexton to Burns in this instance. It has to go wide to give Ringrose a chance at a massive linebreak. Some of these are marginal decisions either way – carry, short or medium pass – but they reflect for me a pattern of handling decisions not being made at crucial moments.

The most egregious of all came with the clock gone red. Not Burns dead ball – that happens to every kicker at some point, you just have to hope it’s not in a pressure cooker moment like here – but this moment a few phases before. Everything up to the crucial moment went excellently – Burns found the runner between a split two man screen and Ireland did excellently to set Ringrose off on a critical break down the wing. When the ball came back, Burns had to find either Lowe or back his pass to find Henshaw (the more difficult of the two). He went for the worst possible option outside of knocking it on – bricking the ball  between both options.

If this goes from Lowe to Henshaw, Ireland have Keenan and Jordan Larmour on the outside with a collosal overlap and, bar a brutal handling error, this is a try under the posts with no time for Wales to respond.

Forget about the ball kicked dead- this was the real moment and it was part of a pattern that was visible all game. Ireland’s need for a ball-dominant second handler to go along Sexton has never been clearer but we don’t know who that player is right now. It isn’t Henshaw. I don’t think it’s Ringrose at this stage either. It doesn’t seem to be Keenan. All are good players – very good players – but the mix in the backline doesn’t seem fully right to me yet and I feel that is something that will remain a stone in our collective shoe until it’s remedied.

This loss has poured a lot of extra pressure onto next week’s game. Playing France in Dublin after our defeat last time out was always going to be a big game but now it’s in the context of being part of a possible two-game losing streak before a game vs Italy and then a runaway to a Scotland side who just beat England and then England in Dublin, who’ll be better than we saw this past weekend.

Four losses from five is not out of the question at the moment, especially with injury and possible suspension issues piling up. Make no mistake, this loss is significant. Sure, Ireland played really well and should have won regardless of the red card but the ugly fact is that they lost and the games do not get any easier from here.

These next four games will define the middle part of Andy Farrell’s tenure. I’m dismissing Italy as a game that Ireland will almost certainly win regardless – if we lose that one, anything is on the table – but this next sequence of France (A), Scotland (H) and England (H) is as tough a run in context as Ireland have had in a good few years.

Andy Farrell’s selection from here on out will define Ireland’s trajectory heading into 2023, which will be here before we know it.

No pressure.

Notable Players

This was a good performance from most of the squad.

I rated Peter O’Mahony down because of his recklessness in the moment. He knows it, you know it, everyone knows it. It’s just one of those costly moments that have to be taken for what they are.

I rated Keith Earls down too, as I felt his touches in this game began to degrade as the game went on. A costly moment under the high ball combined with a kicking error off a turned over lineout lead directly to the second Welsh try. He’s quite a bit better than what we saw here and, at 33, it’s a performance he could well have done without.

James Lowe came in for a lot of criticism post-game for his involvements in both Welsh tries. I’ve been over the first one – a no win situation – but the second came down to a lack of communication between himself and Ringrose at a crucial moment.

If Lowe jockeys on Halfpenny here, Ireland probably hold out on this phase but Lowe doesn’t seem sure that Ringrose has this collision with North. North does have a positive outside shoulder angle on Ringrose to the point where I can make a case for why Lowe wanted to push in on this play to stop the carry but when you step in and don’t stop the ball, you open up space for Wales to make a play. Rees-Zammit’s finish was superb but this was a down mark for Lowe, in the same way that I did for Earls sequence of errors just before this.

Outside of that, I thought Lowe carried really well, kicked superbly and looked dangerous for the full 80 minutes.

Ireland’s entire compliment of front rows played incredibly well. From a base scrummaging perspective, all of them did really well considering they were on the front lines of a numbers disadvantage throughout the game. Outside that, I thought Cian Healy, Rob Herring and Andrew Porter were absolutely brutal over the ball and consistently moved Wales out of the way on almost every collision point they were involved in. Ronan Kelleher, Dave Kilcoyne and Tadhg Furlong added something different – a tonne of impact ball carrying that consistently impacted the Welsh line in the second half.

Iain Henderson had a tough job replacing James Ryan as Ireland’s tighthead lock but he did a manful job in the role throughout under big physical pressure. It wouldn’t be his ideal position, I would say, but he really put a big shift in on-ball, in the lineout and on both sides of the breakdown.

I thought Josh Van Der Flier and CJ Stander did really well in the absence of O’Mahony. Van Der Flier had a good impact in defensive coverage as you’d expect but I’d argue he was most affected by O’Mahony’s absence – he showed up relatively well in offensive collisions but got stripped in contact twice.

CJ Stander had another big game as one of Ireland’s primary offensive outlets and he constantly chipped away at the Welsh line while also showing off his passing range (he made seven passes, Tipuric and Beirne topped the charts with eight). He even managed a lineout steal, which is always good for a guy who was told to maybe try being a hooker close to a decade ago.

He’s still one of the most complete small forwards there is in the Six Nations and there has been zero drop off in the standard of his performances for the last three or four years. Quality.

Tadhg Beirne didn’t deserve to be on the losing side in this game. A few years ago, Wayne Pivac – now the Welsh head coach – opined that Beirne might be too small for the second row in test rugby and for a while, it seemed he might have been onto something. Beirne’s skill was without question but there was always a lingering question of how he’d handle the very biggest outfits. Since late 2020, Beirne has answered every single question that was asked of him and more. Win tight collisions? He does that. Win lineouts? He does that. Be Ireland’s top carrier while also topping the charts in offensive and defensive rucks? He does that too. Score tries? You know the answer to that.

There was very little he didn’t do in this game.

I felt he was quite unlucky not to win a huge breakdown penalty midway through the second half when he the ball was adjudged to still be in “the tackle zone” on this play.

For me, this looks like a poorly resourced Welsh collision point that left the ball presentation without any Welsh players on their feet to create a ruck. Beirne came the long way around the ruck, addressed the ball straight on and, for me, can feel hard done by not to win a big penalty that went the other way instead.

Even with that moment, Beirne was absolutely gargantuan in this game and showed anyone who cared to look that he is more than big enough to be a top class second row at test level. This was Tadhg Beirne at his very best and it hints at even more levels of performance to come. ★★★★★

The Wally Ratings: Wales (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	★★★★
Rob Herring	★★★★
Andrew Porter	★★★★
James Ryan	N/A
Tadhg Beirne	★★★★★
Peter O'Mahony	★
Josh Van Der Flier	★★★
CJ Stander	★★★★
Conor Murray	★★★
Johnny Sexton	★★★
James Lowe	★★★
Robbie Henshaw	★★★★
Gary Ringrose	★★★
Keith Earls	★★
Hugo Keenan	★★★
Ronan Kelleher	★★★★
Dave Kilcoyne	★★★★
Tadhg Furlong	★★★★
Iain Henderson	★★★★
Will Connors	★★★
Jamison Gibson-Park	N/A
Billy Burns	★★
Jordan Larmour	★★★