There’s a tendency to view a game like this as a meaningless curtain-raiser.

Maybe you’d be right to do so. A disjointed Ireland XV full of debutants and relative test rookies so new to this level that 12 of the starting fifteen had five fewer caps combined than Jordan Larmour has on his own looked poor on a greasy night in Hamilton against a highly motivated Māori outfit? Well, yeah, you could easily believe that. There’s nothing shocking about that. Everything about Ireland’s selection said “low-cohesion” and the performance reflected that almost completely.

Now, you might say that a game like this would become far more useful to all the inexperienced guys playing if Ireland would have dotted some test veterans throughout the selection. The answer to that would probably be that Healy, Earls, Murray and Aki are plenty experienced at this level and that guys like Treadwell, Timoney, Heffernan and others are plenty experienced at club level but there’s a big difference when you step up a level as a scratch side in New Zealand to being a club stalwart. I think you need to have 30+ test cappers in every line of the team to get the most out of a game like this and to allow the guys with less than 8 caps room to breathe and grow.

Ireland’s decision to only bring 40 players to New Zealand made that impossible but Ireland’s selection policies over the last few years haven’t focused on building up a wide level of experience below the Category A test selection. It feels like Ireland have been in “win now” territory for at least 18 months of this cycle as Farrell and Catt grappled for legitimacy in the post-Schmidt era.

Schmidt capped 9 new players per year during his tenure and 38% of those players ended up collecting five caps or fewer.

Farrell has so far capped 8 players per year and 56% of those players have less than five caps. Since the summer of 2021, only two players have been capped more than five times – Ryan Baird and Dan Sheehan – so when it comes to a tour like this, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Ireland don’t have a wide base of test experience to pull from because our selection policy has made that a certainty. At the same point during his tenure, Joe Schmidt was capping 10 players per year.

At multiple points during the last year at least, Ireland have passed up the opportunity to spread meaningful minutes around in big games. In November 2021, all nine new caps were handed out in soft games against the USA, mostly, and Japan. When the bigger games against Argentina and New Zealand rolled around, we stuck with the tried and tested because we needed to win now and the best way to do that at test level is to select from a core group of players consistently week to week to week if you can.

We have done more or less the exact same thing for this tour. Even before this game, it would be clear that we were already budgeting minutes to ensure we had the guys we needed for the tests. For Ireland, it’s very much a case that you have to show you can be role twin for someone on the team we have decided will be starting the pool series in 2023 barring injury. Our big experiment during this series was The Porter Switch and dealing with the unplanned retirement of CJ Stander. With those done, we seem to be all but ready for RWC 2023. The relative success of the 2022 Six Nations has nailed that down.

Time will tell if it’s successful, both in the long and short term. For example, who will Andy Farrell fly out to replace the injured Cian Healy, for example? Will it be someone new that he can bed meaningful minutes into ahead of the World Cup? Or will it be someone he’s already discarded at the start of this process that he’s calling back up to fill an injury spot and no more? Or, worse again, will it be a “cohesion” pick from Leinster selected almost purely because they know the system that Ireland and Leinster have been running for the last year?

I think we know what it will be at this stage. Farrell has bet the farm that Leinster’s cohesion will push Ireland to a Rugby World Cup semi-final so why deviate from that now? If Ireland gets to a semi-final and beyond, then it was a success. If Ireland can win this series, it’ll be a success. But if we do neither of those things, questions will and should be asked of Farrell and his team.

And the answers won’t be pretty.

♛ ♛ ♛

Ireland won’t get too twisted up about the result in this game – so I won’t either – but I think there was more than enough for Andy Farrell to worry about as we race towards Eden Park on Saturday for a reckoning with Joe Schmidt and the All Blacks.

The biggest issue for Farrell will be the struggle this Ireland XV went through as they tried to run the counter-transition game that has worked so well for Ireland over the last 12 months. I saw a lot of criticism of Ireland’s kicking game afterwards just purely from a volume perspective. That’s how debased the discourse around the game has become in the last few years. Kicks = Bad so the idea that someone kicked a lot is, like, Real Bad.

Ireland’s problem here wasn’t our kicking, it was the accuracy of our kicking and our inability to control counter-transition sequences.

A counter-transition is when you kick the ball – usually long – to generate a scenario where the opposition has to kick back to you from a weaker position than you kicked the ball from, which allows you to either launch off the set-piece if they go to touch or advance down the field even further with possession and territory if they keep the ball infield. While all this is happening, the opposition pack is moving up and down the field to stay onside as the ball flies overhead while they work themselves into carrying positions when required. It is exhausting.

When done right, it’s like a python tightening its coils around the opposition where you’re just consistently under pressure and you don’t quite know why.

Running a game plan like this is not just booting the ball, however – it is far from that. It’s about kicking the ball to a specific area in the opposition’s half of the field so the first runner’s start point is predictable. From there, you can push up the field to cut off the outside edge from that runner, reduce and remove options and press the inside with your forwards to punish any cuts back infield.

While you do this you’ve also got to ensure your backfield has adequate coverage, especially post-50/22, or the entire thing collapses. You’ve also got to ensure that your inside forward line nails the first tackle to further stress the opposition forwards.

This is a literal picture-perfect example of a counter-transition at the most basic level.

Not all counter-transitions end with a charge down that retains possession immediately, but this is the basic principle.

If you kick too far infield, you’ve broken the system immediately. If you kick in between a contestable and a long drive downfield, you risk breaking the system. If your forward misses the first tackle up the field, you risk breaking the system.

Done right, this strategy will win you games almost on its own. When it’s done wrong, you will concede killer linebreaks and 50/22s almost constantly.

Want to know what happened to Ireland XV here? The latter. It cost us almost all of the 32 points we conceded in the first half and would lose the game for us.

To be fair here, though, while O’Brien and Frawley are used to playing this system for Leinster they aren’t used to playing such key “kick logic” roles within that system so it’s only natural that there were some errors. O’Brien was essentially playing Keenan AND Lowe’s role as the chasing fullback and the big left-footed relief kicker while Frawley would be more likely to be chasing kicks in the primary line as a #12 for Leinster than he would be directing the move/counter-move/counter-counter-move as the main kicking tactician.

You can’t be what you don’t do.

With those key errors undermining almost everything, Ireland had to go off-script to an extent against an opponent that just had to keep us at arm’s length. We were much better in the second half but unforced errors and some great goalline defence by the Māori kept us from building a score back in a way that might pressure the hosts.

The second half saw some strong individual performances by guys like Coombes, Casey, Baird, Scannell (who was really good for a guy with airport Toblerone still in his gear bag) and Aki but with a 22-point mountain to climb in 40 minutes, along with errors in contact and a malfunctioning lineout, it wasn’t to be.

For Ireland, the key question is how the All Blacks processed our work on the counter-transition. We’ll be much sharper and cohesive on Saturday morning but how will our chase stack up with the sharpness of the All Blacks’ direct transition attack. We saw here what errors will result in against a Kiwi side and the All Blacks, if anything will be even better.

Was this the first example of where New Zealand feel they can break us? Or will we be so much sharper that the winning and losing of the game fall elsewhere?

We’ll find out soon enough.

 

The Wally Ratings: Māori All Blacks (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
Jeremy Loughman	N/A
Dave Heffernan	★★
Tom O'Toole	★★
Kieran Treadwell	★★
Joe McCarthy	★★
Cian Prendergast	★★★
Nick Timoney	★★★
Gavin Coombes	★★★★
Craig Casey	★★★
Ciaran Frawley	★★
Keith Earls	★★★
Bundee Aki	★★★
James Hume	★★★
Jordan Larmour	★★★
Jimmy O'Brien	★★
Niall Scannell	★★★
Cian Healy	★★★
Finlay Bealham	N/A
Ryan Baird	★★★
Jack Conan	N/A
Conor Murray	DNP
Joey Carbery	★★
Mike Lowry	★★★