[su_dropcap style=”flat”]W[/su_dropcap]hen a host of your star players and core performers are absent, you get a good read as to where you are as a squad and where you are as a coaching unit. Ireland, without the talents and on-field influence of Tadhg Furlong, Cian Healy, Johnny Sexton, Gary Ringrose, Iain Henderson, Keith Earls, Robbie Henshaw, Conor Murray, Andrew Porter, Bundee Aki and Tadhg Beirne would face a serious test against Japan, a side who have cast something of a pall over Ireland since Shizuoka 2019.
When you are down that many top-class players – for a variety of reasons – you get a good read of the clarity of your offensive and defensive schemes and a measure of your remaining big players. When Tadhg Beirne isn’t there to win a big turnover, when Tadhg Furlong isn’t there to make a big carry or win a scrum penalty, when Robbie Henshaw isn’t there to be a giant rugby cheat code, when Johnny Sexton and Conor Murray aren’t there to work out the problems, what are you as a playing group? Summer tests like this give you a good read of that but it’s mostly a coaching exercise. How much clarity can you impart to a new group in 12 days? Is your message loud enough and clear enough that it (a) brings along a new, diverse group and (b) is good enough to beat a side that we really wanted to beat.
And I mean, we really wanted this W. This was no ordinary summer test where a win would be nice but the main aim was spreading minutes around our young talent and depth chart prospects. This was a game we were sweating.
Ireland didn’t select a squad that reflected this game being just a summer test before the game. Andy Farrell certainly didn’t use the bench that way in the second half.
For example, we were two scores to the good from the 68th minute but only brought on Gavin Coombes for Peter O’Mahony in the 70th minute. Injuries to Farrell and Larmour early in the game made bringing on our last bench replacement – Craig Casey – something of a risk, in that if someone else got injured in the time between Casey coming on the field and full time, we might have to finish the game with 14 players. Our coaching unit was so concerned about those 14 men possibly coughing up a two-score lead in the last 10 minutes that Casey only saw 90 seconds of action when he was brought on for Jamison Gibson-Park prior to defending a Japanese scrum midway into their 22.
If that deep field position had not been secured, we might not have seen Casey at all.
I’m not sure what that says about anything really, only that Farrell and his team didn’t think we ever had this game nailed down at any stage, to the point that even the idea of 10 minutes worth of defending with 14 men was too much to risk. Maybe Japan are just that good.
Or maybe we allowed them to be.
In a lot of ways, Japan are something of a template for Ireland in 2021.
Everyone keeps saying that we should be playing like Japan and my answer to that is – we’re trying. We run a variant of the attacking shape popularised by Japan, we are running schemes similar to what they like to produce off wide screens and we give our players licence to play with the kind of offloading that Japan have become synonymous with (rightly or wrongly).
Most of all, we want to use the concepts popularised by Japan. We want to play with the width they get on phase play, we want to be dangerous on transition as they are and we want to succeed against physically bigger teams, like England and France. Ultimately, we want to take what Japan used to beat us, repurpose it to fit our bigger, higher-calibre power athletes and make something that pushes our game beyond what Japan achieved in 2019. This happens the game over. Take what worked elsewhere, tweak it, make it your own. Everyone is a thief of some description.
The problem is that Japan have a clarity that we currently lack on both sides of the ball.
Make no mistake, Japan lost this game because, once we got our lineout sorted out, we were able to batter them into submission once the threat of our maul pinned them in place.
We didn’t even have to vary our schemes all that much, or even at all. The exact same gag worked twice in each half.
Once we were able to consistently nail our own lineout possession deep in the Japanese half, we had the ball carrying impact to hurt them over and over again. This is something that we would have expected before the game, both this week and ahead of that game in the 2019 World Cup.
Our lineout schemes from further out ran less successfully, despite trying them multiple times in some instances, like this strike move we used around the Japanese 10m line in both halves.
On both occasions, the move broke down after the Kelleher carry on the second phase, where it seemed Carbery and Doris were out of sync with each other on both occasions. This kind of thing is to be expected. Rugby is a game of cohesion and both players have very little time with each other on the field over the last two years, which can be a problem for your primary playmaker and primary ball carrier in small, fleeting moments like these.
The reality is, though, that even with these janky moments Ireland seemed to score whenever we got clean possession for our primary ball carriers off any close range set-piece where Japan consistently failed to live with the impact ball carrying of Doris, McCloskey and Kelleher. Whenever we launched those runners successfully from anywhere near the 22, tries were never far behind.
So how did we almost lose this game?
For me, the only reason this game didn’t resemble the Lions scoreline from last week came down to a series of unforced Irish errors and defensive miscalculations all throughout the game, from the very first sequence of play on that lead directly to Japanese points.
Our restarts in the first half were very poor, for example.
The first error by Dillane lead directly to a penalty concession which naturally produced a close range maul defence sequence, which we defended extraordinarily poorly by any standard.
That’s just poor communication and, again, shows a real lack of clarity. We end up committing to two launch pods here because of the quality of the Japanese jump feint at the front. That means Bealham can’t hinge onto Dillane’s half counter-launch which, as a consequence, means Ireland have already lost the maul contest as soon as Japan bring the ball down successfully. Two errors in sequence = seven Japanese points.
The second blown restart lead to a penalty that Japan banged off the post.
The mistakes didn’t end there.
This is a real head scratcher for me. Was the defence schemed to act this way, with Larmour moving from the middle “swing” position – where he would react to the position of the ball as it progressed – to help Keenan take the kick receipt on the left tram, even though it would leave Ireland naturally unbalanced in the right backfield?
Or did Larmour just take it on himself to go off structure? I suspect it might be the latter.
The inverse seemed to happen later in the game in a similar scenario.
Carbery’s kick down the line didn’t make touch as, I presume, it was intended to do. In that instance, you want your edge defenders to get a stop but in this instance they were unable to do. My issue here is Billy Burns read of the situation – is he looking at what is happening and reacting appropriately? Or is he sticking rigidly to the scheme that he must file out to the edge now because that’s what’s drawn up?
With the bulk of the forwards still in midfield recovering position post-scrum, the gap that needed to be filled was where the nine Japanese players were, not in the space on the far edge where he was probably schemed to be in a situation like that.
Clarity. And seven more Japanese points.
On phase play defence, we showed similar issues on clarity of thought from a systemic perspective.
What do Japan want? Defensive compressions, overpoaching lost causes at the breakdown and overchasing short blitzes.
What did we show them too often?
Defensive compressions, overpoached rucks and shooting out on short blitzes.
It felt that Ireland were struggling to catch up with the Japanese attack – that we were very easily unbalanced – it was in part because of these tendencies repeating themselves at key moments.
Everytime Ireland switched off in defence, be it a poor fold, a poor backfield decision or a bad defensive read, Japan seemed to score seven points.
That’s the mark of a good team, and they are a good team, but what does that say about the team that continues to give them window after window to make plays?
***
I’m writing this as if Ireland lost, right? We won and that’s great but there’s a rhetorical danger in declaring the bogeyman from 2019 to be fully slain, in the same way that a win over an English side with two prior losses in the Six Nations this year could be seen to have saved what had been an underwhelming tournament up to that point.
We scored five good, system specific tries that we’ll be happy with, especially this ripper of a score on kick transition.
But that doesn’t mean that Ireland were impressive here. Not even close.
My contention is, and always has been, that Japan are a good attacking team that an elite side should always be putting away comfortably. That’s what the Springboks did repeatedly. That’s what the Lions did last week. It’s what Ireland should have done this week, had our defensive application and overall concentration been where it needed to be. Is it the coaching or the players? Maybe it’s neither. Maybe it’s just the rust that comes with summer tours and tonnes of new bodies in camp. That doesn’t fully scan with the highly experienced core of the team named to start here but that doesn’t matter for now. Is this too harsh an examination for a summer test? Perhaps, but we didn’t treat it like a summer test so maybe it’s warranted.
Regardless, we’ve put away Japan and will beat the USA next week without much bother. The next proper test for this group will, we assume, come in the November tests where we are rumoured to be playing Argentina and the All Blacks.
For now though, job done.
Notable Players
The guy who fluctuated most between my ratings during different watchbacks was Ronán Kelleher, without a doubt. His defensive and ball carrying impact is without question and it’s consistently top class. He made a number of key carries in this game that lead directly to scoring situations and his breakdown threat was literally game-securing.
The problem is his lineout throwing which, for a hooker, is a problem. All throughout this season, Kelleher has had moments where he looks like he’d rather be anywhere else than standing on the white line getting ready to hit a jumper. In this game, Ireland had a few key lineouts that we really needed and Kelleher’s throwing wasn’t up to the moment. With top players, it’s not a case that they can’t throw – he clearly can – but it’s the consistency of their throw in pressure moments.
It’s an obvious thing but he needs to shore up this part of his game. Ireland’s lineout call selection didn’t help Kelleher in the first half. The last two lineouts in the montage above saw him waiting at the line for a complex decoy scheme to play out before hitting a difficult throw to the tail, which isn’t ideal for a hooker who bricked a 5m opportunity on the previous throw.
He was decent here despite some issues with his throw. If he can tighten up his pressure throwing, Kelleher has it all to be a top player.
Josh Van Der Flier was one of Ireland’s top performers. His defensive application was generally quite good, as you’d expect but he showed up really well with some venomous carries at key moments.
That area of Van Der Flier’s game has really come on over the last season, which won’t come as a surprise to anyone as you literally never stop hearing about it from the hundreds of former Leinster player pundits working in the media, but this game was a good example of his improvements in that area, albeit against a side where I’d expect he should be making that kind of ground. This was a very solid performance.
He was joined by an equally impressive Peter O’Mahony, who played a crucial role in the ultimate stabilisation of Ireland’s performance.
O’Mahony won a key turnover and was a key offensive threat in the wide channels when Ireland managed to move the ball there.
But his biggest role was in stabilising the Irish restart, which had been a mess for much of the first half, and becoming a primary lineout target for Ronán Kelleher.
That’s what you want your big players to do in a game like this – fix what’s going wrong, make themselves important and show up with big moments. I think a large part of why we didn’t see O’Mahony come off until relatively late was because of that game-winning impact he was having, which is another example of what he offers as a top-class support forward.
The Wally Ratings: Japan (H)
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 |
|---|---|
| Dave Kilcoyne | ★★ |
| Ronan Kelleher | ★★★ |
| Finlay Bealham | ★★★ |
| Ultan Dillane | ★★ |
| James Ryan | ★★ |
| Peter O'Mahony | ★★★★ |
| Josh Van Der Flier | ★★★★ |
| Caelan Doris | ★★★ |
| Jamison Gibson-Park | ★★★ |
| Joey Carbery | ★★★ |
| Jacob Stockdale | ★★★ |
| Stuart McCloskey | ★★★ |
| Chris Farrell | ★★★ |
| Jordan Larmour | ★★ |
| Hugo Keenan | ★★★ |
| Rob Herring | ★★★ |
| Ed Byrne | ★★★ |
| John Ryan | ★★★ |
| Ryan Baird | ★★★★ |
| Gavin Coombes | N/A |
| Craig Casey | N/A |
| Billy Burns | ★★ |
| Shane Daly | ★★★ |
