In this game, the opposition is the enemy, but the pitch and the clock can be enemies too in the right circumstances.
If you can’t control the opposition, you have to control the pitch and if you can’t do either, you must control the clock. Fail at all three for long enough, and you lose every single time.
I feel pretty comfortable saying that Ireland lost this game in four ten-minute blocks, two on either side of halftime. In these blocks, we lost control of the ball for long periods and, in conjunction with the try we conceded inside the first five minutes, we were constantly chasing a game against a bigger, stronger opponent and, worse again, doing it inaccurately.
This game also revealed a problem with this Irish team’s pack and midfield build that we have, to this point, managed to get away with against most teams. The problem is this; we have no primary ball carriers.
We have a lot of really good ruck support players and, in Caelan Doris, a really good (and rightly undroppable) heavy combo-flanker who carries habitually and well but we have no pure ball-carrying focus and it’s hurting us against super heavyweight teams. This problem does not present itself against the likes of Wales or Scotland – these sides are not in our league and currently unworthy of discussion at this level – but against France, England and South Africa, the problem is clearly visible.
It didn’t show against France this season thanks to Paul Willemse – one of their biggest and heaviest tight defenders – getting himself yellow-carded and then red-carded, but it will do so again in 2025. England showed it in Twickenham, South Africa showed it here.
You can track it on the ORW charts because it’s so consistent.
- A good start with a CORW score between 50-80 in the first ten minutes. Our decent start was badly undone by a sloppy try concession.
- That good start is almost always followed by long periods without the ball and ever-declining CORW scoring block on block, with a rise right at the end of the first half when the super heavyweight team begins to tire. That exact thing happened against South Africa at the weekend and led to Osbourne’s try.
- We then usually start well after the break but that didn’t happen against South Africa. We had two really poor ten-minute blocks back to back which cost us the game right when we made our bench transition.
- Once our changes bedded in and South Africa began to tire – in part due to a fairly limp impact from their replacements – we finished really strongly and it’s not outlandish to say that we could have won the game if not for two low-percentage try concessions from two Springbok kicks in the last quarter. We wouldn’t have deserved it on the balance of the game but, still, we had the possession for it.
- We saw a similar uptick in CORW scoring in the last two ten-minute blocks against England, France and South Africa off the back of bad 50-60-minute blocks. This coincides with Porter/Sheehan/Furlong hitting the wall physically and being replaced, along with other changes to the back five.
These patterns of possession under duress followed by off-blocks off recovery are consistent throughout our games against super heavyweight opposition. For me, the data is clear – we lack the size and ball-carrying power to engage super-heavyweight opposition in the same manner that we do against “smaller” teams.
The individual ORW scoring tells its own story.
| Dominant Clean | Guard Action | Attendance | Ineffective | Ruck Work Score | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Porter | 8 | 5 | 1 | 19 | |
| Sheehan | 2 | 3 | 2 | 14 | |
| Furlong | 3 | 8 | 3 | 1 | 26 |
| McCarthy | 4 | 2 | 6 | -2 | |
| Beirne | 2 | 18 | 1 | 2 | 39 |
| O'Mahony | 13 | 1 | 27 | ||
| Van Der Flier | 1 | 28 | 2 | 2 | 57 |
| Doris | 14 | 3 | 2 | 27 | |
| Casey | 1 | 2 | |||
| Crowley | 1 | 4 | 11 | ||
| Lowe | 4 | 8 | |||
| Aki | 1 | 7 | 17 | ||
| Henshaw | 3 | 6 | |||
| Nash | 1 | 5 | 13 | ||
| Osbourbe | 2 | 4 | |||
| Kelleher | 5 | 1 | 11 | ||
| Healy | 2 | 1 | 1 | 6 | |
| Bealham | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 7 |
| Ryan | 6 | 2 | 2 | 18 | |
| Baird | 3 | 2 | 8 | ||
| Murray | 1 | 2 | |||
| Frawley | 1 | 1 | 3 | ||
| Ringrose | 1 | 6 | 15 |
Top Five ORW Scorers
- Josh Van Der Flier – 57 points
- Tadhg Beirne – 39 points
- Peter O’Mahony/Caelan Doris – 27 points
- Tadhg Furlong – 26 points
- Andrew Porter – 19 points
Van Der Flier and O’Mahony’s work at the breakdown was so good I bumped them back up to a three-star score. Their lack of impact with the ball in hand – and in the tackle – stayed the same but their effort and accuracy at the breakdown was super impressive. James Ryan’s performance off the bench was like the James Ryan of old when it came to his breakdown performance; he was constantly impacting with dominant, physical cleanouts.
His carrying and defensive impact was negligible but when I’ve consistently marked him down for poor breakdown performances, I felt this performance off the bench was so impactful I had to bump him up two full stars.
Doris was Ireland’s primary ball carrier and balanced this with good breakdown work too but this is part of the problem; he’s not a natural heavy ball carrier in my opinion. He seems to have sized up in the last few months to, perhaps, take on that role but in this game, I thought he was a little too easily stopped. It’s not a role that he’s comfortable in as of yet.
But the real issue is elsewhere.
We Need To Talk About Joe
Joe McCarthy is worth the push that he’s gotten from Andy Farrell since before the World Cup. He’s not a Will Skelton or Eben Etzebeth tier second row and it’s an unfair comparison to make of him. He’s 6’5″ – visibly shorter than the 6’6″ Tadhg Beirne – and plays around 120kg at the moment. From a build perspective, he’s much closer to a Joe Tekori or Mamuka Gorgodze-style lock and it’s not hard to guess why he’s been jumped up the levels for Ireland and Leinster; he’s a big, abrasive ball carrier who can sling a lot of weight around in theory.
I say “in theory” here because there is currently a massive gap between the expectations of McCarthy and his on-field reality. His breakdown performance here was abysmal; every bit as bad as his game against Italy in the Six Nations. He’s a big, heavy strong lad who just can’t get his timing or entries to match up with the pictures in front of him.
Like here, for example, he’s flying off his feet as the inside barrel on a clean – why he wasn’t charging in place to be the middle pod carrier is another story – and he’s actually having zero impact. Going off his feet for nothing at all and then takes an age to get back into the attacking line. The tackler can still impact a counter-ruck that Van Der Flier has to brace against. But on the stat sheet, this is a first arrival at the ruck and therefore good, despite not actually doing anything of value.
Watch him closely and you’ll see these types of clean out constantly. They betray his legit power and size because he could be nailing these rucks. This is another layup for him where he should be dropping low and piling through De Allende, Beirne and Nche but he gets his angles of entry all wrong. He ends up swinging around the contact point and slowing the ball down.
McCarthy should be driving this to the tryline or at the very least getting it to the ground so we can have a ruck offside line and quick ball. He’s more than big and strong enough to do it but he gets his angles all wrong. He’s actually turning the ideal latch and drive position into something way more awkward.
McCarthy is too in love with the right shoulder – where all his power is – instead of the obvious left shoulder impact on De Allende. Even then, he’s entering way too high.
In this next clip, you can see McCarthy repeating the “inside barrel, cleaning nothing so the outside barrel has to clean it for you” job before Tadhg Furlong shows exactly how you enter and bring this kind of contact to the floor.
If McCarthy was combining this poor breakdown work with really impactful ball-carrying it would be something but he’s not doing this either. He doesn’t get on-ball half enough for my liking and even in these clips you can see why; all too often he’s chasing position from the previous phase. You can still see senior players shoving Joe into position and this is not a one-off. You see it every other game.
I think this is partly because he’s super raw, currently lacks game IQ for the starting role he has and too much is being expected of him. The Big Joe McCarthy stuff that was absolutely everywhere in the last 12 months is the worst thing for this guy because he’s not ready for that level of heat. His best-ever performance – against a seven-man French pack shorn of their biggest, heaviest lock defender – was genuinely excellent but it’s an aberration. Watch him against Toulouse and the Bulls in the last few months and forget about a facile win over a La Rochelle side that were so physically cooked from the travel in the two weeks before that turkey shoot of a quarter-final that they might as well have been playing in sleeping bags.
Right now the idea of Joe McCarthy far outweighs the reality. Does this mean that he should be jettisoned from the test side? No. I think he’s been hurt the most by James Ryan’s physical regression as a ball-carrying second row and Ireland/Leinster’s general lack of primary heavy ball carriers. Farrell, Easterby and O’Connell have recognised this reality and have tried to fix Ireland’s James Ryan Problem with the allure of what McCarthy could be. But this has, in turn, created a new problem because he’s not ready for this role as a tighthead lock power forward. He isn’t impacting at the offensive breakdown and he isn’t dominating with the ball in hand either.
He’s been jumped up to an Irish starter because, on paper, he’s exactly what this pack build needs but at the moment he’s miles off from producing in this role consistently. And consistency is the issue. The biggest thing Ireland could do for McCarthy is to half his ruck entries – he made 12 in his 49 minutes – and focus on getting himself into the middle of pods off #9 in the opposition half of the field so he can start imposing himself on defenders. He isn’t accurate enough to be an outside barrel cleaner and he’s not quick enough to be an inside barrel so stop wasting the boy’s time and get him into a role that suits who the player he is now, not the player we want him to be. Ireland, Leinster and McCarthy will be immediately better off.
