Part of the reason why lopsided Tier 1 vs Tier 3 games like this annoy me is that they usually mess up my ORW metrics.
Usually.
In this case, it wasn’t wildly off the pace with what we’d expect from Ireland against an on-ball team. Our Collective Offensive Ruck Work score was 387 – in line with what we’ve produced against Scotland and Italy in the recent past and significantly more than we produced against Samoa and England in the last few weeks – albeit with a caveat. I’ll get to that later.
Let’s get into the data and see what we can see.
IRELAND’S OFFENSIVE RUCK WORK SCORE vs ROMANIA
- 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.
| Player Name | Dominant Clean | Guard Action | Attendance | Ineffective | Ruck Work Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Porter | 1 | 5 | 13 | ||
| Herring | 13 | 26 | |||
| Furlong | 1 | 5 | 1 | 14 | |
| McCarthy | 3 | 13 | 1 | 36 | |
| Ryan | 1 | 9 | 21 | ||
| Beirne | 2 | 15 | 36 | ||
| O'Mahony | 4 | 16 | 44 | ||
| Doris | 8 | 16 | |||
| Gibson-Park | 0 | ||||
| Sexton | 2 | 1 | 2 | ||
| Lowe | 2 | 1 | 1 | 9 | |
| Aki | 7 | 14 | |||
| Ringrose | 1 | 12 | 27 | ||
| Earls | 1 | 3 | 9 | ||
| Keenan | 13 | 26 | |||
| Kelleher | 1 | 12 | 27 | ||
| Loughman | 1 | 4 | 1 | 9 | |
| O'Toole | 9 | 18 | |||
| Henderson | 6 | 1 | 10 | ||
| Van Der Flier | 9 | 18 | |||
| Murray | 2 | 4 | |||
| Crowley | 3 | 6 | |||
| Hansen | 1 | 2 |
Top Five ORW Scorers
- Peter O’Mahony – 42 points
- Joe McCarthy / Tadhg Beirne – 36 points
- Garry Ringrose / Ronan Kelleher – 27 points
- Rob Herring / Hugo Keenan – 26 points
- James Ryan – 21 points
A few things jump out to me immediately.
One; Peter O’Mahony can easily fit into the very specific breakdown role usually deployed by the Irish #7. O’Mahony’s numbers are usually bumped by a lot of Dominant Cleans and, while he had those cleans here, he had way more Guard Actions than he normally would – right around the baseline for Van Der Flier which is between 16/18 Guard Actions per game.
Ireland suffered no loss of breakdown coverage with O’Mahony at #7 and Beirne at #6, who had fantastic numbers of his own while also offering a real threat in the wider channels. O’Mahony’s work in the #7 jersey demanded that he track across the field with the ball as opposed to sticking to the edge spaces – where you’ll not Beirne spent a lot of his time when Ireland were outside the Romanian 5m line – but I think it really suited him as he got in a tonne of passes as a pod runner.
Two; It seems like Ireland gave Porter and Doris the day off, so to speak. Both were well below their usual level of breakdown output but I think that was entirely deliberate. They are key players for us so if rotation wasn’t an option, as it doesn’t seem to be, I have no issue with them taking a stroll through this game where we were 50 points to the good in the last 20 minutes.
Three; Joe McCarthy’s work rate and impact ball carrying actually dovetailed really well together but I was a little disappointed with Henderson’s return off the bench in a game where he should really have been everywhere.
Four; Ringrose’s offensive breakdown work is the best thing about his game and Keenan’s consistent breakdown output is the third best thing about his game, after his high ball work and his pace.
Five; Ronan Kelleher is ready for road. His numbers off the bench were really good, albeit with the knowledge that Romania were blowing black smoke like an old diesel tug boat by the time he came on.
Looking at overall trends, we don’t even need to weight our CORW – we just scored far more tries per action than we would against an elite opponent.
In the third game under these metrics, we can begin to see a trend emerging. In the last two games, big final quarters have buffed our ORW scoring in the last two games but that third-quarter dip is something to look out for – it’s well below the baseline of our season prior to these warmups and could hurt us as the level of opposition increases.
So far the outliers appear to be a bad second quarter against Samoa – weather affected, which will be relevant again this weekend against Tonga – and a bad last quarter against England. If we can shape those up, we might have the consistency of breakdown coverage to hurt Tonga, a team that I think we’ll need a 450+ CORW game to beat and then a 550+ game against the Springboks a week later.
It’s all cranking up quite nicely.
