Rugby is an outcome-based game. I suppose all games are that way, really. If you win, it doesn’t matter how bad your metrics were. If you lose, it doesn’t matter how good they were. The only true metric of any worth is how many points did you score vs how many did they score when the ref blows up the game.
When you look at the stat sheet for this game, two things jump out as a positive; Ireland’s ruck recycle rate was mostly under three seconds (a good thing) and we had 100% completion (a very good thing). So why, then, did Ireland only seal a 14-point win late in the game against a side we have traditionally beaten quite comfortably over the last few seasons? Yes, Italy have gotten better but a majority of rucks under three seconds combined with 100% ruck retention should have translated better than it did on the scoreboard.
There are reasons for that, of course – and I won’t go into them here – but when I saw 100% retention with 64% of all retained rucks under 3 seconds I also expected to see incredibly high ORW scores across the forwards, #12 and #15.
Against France, we had multiple players scoring north of 50 with both McCloskey and Keenan – two of our most consistent offensive breakdown support backs – scoring over 30 points on my scale.
Now, Ireland did have 42 more rucks against France than they did against Italy, so that would explain some of the drop-offs in volume but it doesn’t fully explain what we saw here. Let’s just get into the numbers.
IRELAND’S OFFENSIVE RUCK WORK SCORE VS ITALY
- A Dominant Clean is an action that decisively secures possession when the ball carrier takes contact. A Dominant Clean does not have to be the first arrival at the breakdown but it is rewarded in the context of effectiveness. We will assign this action 3 points.
- A Guard Action is where a player plays a role in helping to retain possession after we have “re-won” the ball on the floor. Sometimes this can happen on a carry/ruck point where there is no active contention by the opposition. Let’s assign this action 2 points.
- An Attendance can be anything from standing as a “kick shield” on a ruck to adding a bit of bulk to ward against a counter-ruck. I’m marking this down as being worth 1 point.
- An Ineffective Action is a blown cleanout, a lean, a breakdown penalty or an action that I couldn’t see any direct benefit for. This will be worth -2 points.
| Dominant Clean | Guard Action | Attendance | Ineffective | Ruck Work Score | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Porter | 1 | 16 | 2 | 1 | 35 |
| Kelleher | 4 | 13 | 1 | 39 | |
| Bealham | 11 | 22 | |||
| Henderson | 1 | 13 | 1 | 1 | 28 |
| Ryan | 1 | 13 | 3 | 5 | 22 |
| Doris | 1 | 16 | 2 | 1 | 35 |
| Van Der Flier | 18 | 2 | 32 | ||
| Conan | 3 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 10 |
| Casey | 0 | ||||
| Byrne | 1 | 1 | 0 | ||
| Lowe | 3 | 3 | 9 | ||
| McCloskey | 4 | 8 | 28 | ||
| Aki | 2 | 3 | 1 | 12 | |
| Hansen | 2 | 4 | 1 | 15 | |
| Keenan | 4 | 7 | 2 | 22 | |
| Sheehan | 2 | 4 | 14 | ||
| Kilcoyne | 3 | 2 | 13 | ||
| O'Toole | 1 | 5 | 13 | ||
| Baird | 8 | 1 | 1 | 15 | |
| O'Mahony | 1 | 4 | 11 | ||
| Murray | 0 | ||||
| Crowley | 0 | ||||
| O'Brien | 1 | 2 | 7 |
Against France, I marked Ireland down with 19 ineffective entries out of 142 rucks. So, essentially, Ireland had an ineffective entry on 13.3% of the rucks in that game. This week against Italy, Ireland had 18 ineffective entries from 94 – a rate of 19.5% per ruck. But why does that matter in a game where Ireland didn’t lose a single ruck?
Because if that inefficiency is repeated with a different referee and against less flawed opposition, we lose.
On my dive back through this game I was shocked at some of the breakdown penalties that weren’t given against Ireland to the point where I had to do a second run a day later just to make sure I wasn’t coming in with a bias. Ireland plays fast and loose at the breakdown anyway when it comes to angles of entry but some of them in this game were comical. Not only that, there were a few occasions when I’m sure Italy were fuming at the lack of a call but that goes on trend for Mike Adamson, who doesn’t tend to reward defensive teams at the breakdown in all but the most blindingly obvious of scenarios. To be fair, Italy were aware of this and rarely competed on Ireland’s ruck ball directly with a poach. Ireland vs Italy had the lowest number of penalties awarded for breakdown infringements in the Six Nations to date this season.
You might say that was because it was an incredibly clean game at the ruck but it really wasn’t – this is a quirk of Mike Adamson refereed games that can sometimes present itself if the circumstances are right.
With an inefficiency rate like this with any other referee, I genuinely believe that we lose this game or, at the very least, win it narrowly and late on.
My theory for why this was?
Look, for me, it comes down to a bad role mix in the back five in this particular game. I don’t think this mix of Henderson/Ryan/Doris/Van Der Flier and Jack Conan can work against any serious test outfit.
Jack Conan’s performance in the #8 role was particularly disappointing. In the last two weeks, Doris produced games where he totally more than 50 ORW points. In the same role this week, Conan produced 10 ORW points while also losing a tonne of on-ball collisions. By any metric, this was a poor performance in almost every single facet of the game. It’s the lowest score I have for a back-five forward who played longer than a half of rugby in my history of compiling this metric. He looked bang off role, especially in a game where Ireland were unable to move the ball consistently to the wider positions where he has always looked superior as a heavy wing forward.
It was so pronounced that Van Der Flier and Doris both seemed to underperform their usual output until Doris reverted back to a primary carrying role in the 56th minute. By the same token, when Iain Henderson went off James Ryan’s ruck production dropped off a cliff but was compensated by Ryan Baird and Peter O’Mahony.
The praise for James Ryan’s performances over the last few weeks have really confused me because it didn’t stack up with what I was seeing on-field, until I realised that he’s scoring tries. Try-scoring completely unbalances the perception of players, especially scrumhalves and tight five forwards, so it’s not too much of a surprise to see that here. For me, Ryan’s breakdown output has really degraded season on season. He’s producing a tonne of inefficient entries per game – five here, four against France, and seven against Wales. What do I mean by this?
I mean entries like this, which I marked Ryan down as ineffective (along with Bealham).
Why is this ineffective? First, Conan loses the collision which always makes the cleaners’ job difficult, so we accept that as a difficulty multiplier. Ryan is a little late to the collision, for me, so he isn’t in a position to keep the second defender from flopping over the top of the contact point and slowing our possession. What should he have done? Look at Ronan Kellher’s treatment of a second tackler in this clip, at pace.
Ryan’s a bigger athlete, yes, but he’s looked more stiff and slow to react than he ever has in the last few Six Nations games. Even if we accept that he’s used as a primary, 80-minute ball carrier with a big lineout output – as he was in this game and against France – these inefficient entries will catch up with him and Ireland at some point. Should he be dropped? Absolutely not. But the numbers we are seeing from him at the breakdown, especially in a game where he scrummaged on the loosehead side while Henderson was on the field are a concern, especially with Scotland coming up next week.
My top performer was Ronan Kelleher, who showed once again that the position of Ireland’s starting hooker is far from settled. He was outstandingly physical at the breakdown here with some excellent efficiency and outstanding dominant physicality. He is a quick ball machine, and Ireland are benefitting from that Kelleher/Sheehan one-two punch.
