Andy Farrell loves adversity.

Not enough that he’d have Ireland travel from Australia to Japan and then to New Zealand in the span of a month — a late bus is the right amount of adversity for this Irish team — so we can only wonder what Japan would have looked like without travelling 7800km to this “home game”, but Ireland beat Japan, as we were broadly expected to. That’s the long and short of this game.

This was a classic Rotated Ireland vs Tier 2 game in a lot of ways, with the reaction to match. Andy Farrell’s main Irish team has become so familiar that the reaction to a rotated version of it reminds me of my favourite creepypasta.

The story starts with a child in their bedroom. Let’s call the child “Tom”. It’s dark. Cold. They wake up in the middle of the night and hear their mother calling to them from the hallway outside, through the crack of the door. “Tom. Tom. Come here. Come here, Tom”.

He’s about to get up to go to them, but they stop. Something about the voice isn’t quite right. It sounds just like their mother, but the cadence of the voice is off. The voice gets louder. “Tom! Tom! I’m hurt, come and help me!”

The child gets scared. He’s about to get out of bed when he realises that his mother is lying in bed next to him, sleeping quietly.

The door slams shut.

Rotated Ireland is the voice through the crack of the door. Similar enough in most ways to pass, but with enough things wrong to unsettle the watching audience.

They look at identical attacking schemes, executed more or less the same way as the main Irish team, but it feels off. The main Irish team has laboured against Tier 2 opposition plenty of times — some better than this Japan team, some worse — but the reaction to this game seemed to squirm at the discomfort of the familiar.

Ireland are a system team. The system team. When the team is what everyone knows, it runs according to the principles we can clearly identify. It’s a smooth machine. Whether that machine generates a win or a loss depends on the opponent, but the way the system is judged is based on the smoothness of its running.

This is a good example of something that might easily happen to the main Irish team, but that would fundamentally damage someone who aspires to break into Farrell’s Circle of Trust.

It’s our usual 1-3-2-1 shape — albeit with the pod of two off #10 down to one player after a scrap for the ball on the previous ruck — but the timing is off.

Conan’s pinch line here is badly timed, and that seems to throw off Frawley for a split second as he seems to identify that with Conan’s line coming a hair too early, the Japanese press won’t be held by that option. The pass goes between Henshaw and O’Brien, but Osbourne does well to scramble back.

This is the kind of thing that could feasibly happen with a layered scheme, with lots of hands and running lines from depth, but a small disconnect puts a relative newbie in an unfamiliar position — Frawley — under pressure early in the game.

Overall, though, I don’t think Ireland attacked all that badly within the framework we’ve come to expect. There were a few janky moments, as you’d expect with so many changes, but it looked pretty good overall.

This is… pretty good? Like, I don’t see all that much wrong with what we’re doing here. The delivery from the ruck is quick. Our layered runners are cutting at the right time. The tip ons and pull-back passes are good.

I suppose the real issue is that Eddie Jones knew exactly how to stymie Ireland, so the system was working, but the opposition was causing the system problems by taking away key parts of it.

They weren’t fully successful, by any means, but enough to cause trouble for a time. Japan knew, for example, that if you blitz the second layer of Ireland’s attack, you have a good chance of scragging a pass option. Ireland countered that by loading up McCloskey for a lot of direct carries towards the edges to put a physical mismatch on the smaller Japanese backs, who looked a little overwhelmed once Riley went off.

That was our difference maker, when it counted.

Of far more interest was Ireland’s lineout, and Japan’s behaviour towards it.

How do you frustrate a system team that, when you boil them down, has two core launch points? Ireland’s big strength is the lineout. When it goes well, we typically do well. Most of our best work is derived from it, but if you get at our lineout, or our work off the lineout, we can turn into a malfunctioning robot, battering our heads off the wall until the screws fall loose.

For a start, Japan placed a winger at the tail of the lineout for any Irish lineout outside the Japanese 10m line.

Why?

Because if you watch Ireland enough, you’ll know we have two processes from these lineouts; either a maul feint or a drop down to Jamison Gibson Park so he can start our set piece strike play, or a pass back for a long, high contestable.

Eddie Jones decided that if you put a winger at the tail of the lineout, you have a faster player to step up and shut down Gibson-Park or Casey, so the launch play is under pressure on the first pass.

He also knew that regardless of whether it was Prendergast, Frawley or Byrne, that high contestable kick is automatically slow because of the wind-up and delivery it takes to do it accurately. I think Jones expected Prendergast to start this — he’s particularly slow when he’s winding up for that kick because he has to set his hands for a spiral — but it would work with any of the #10s because that’s what our system demands.

That a winger happened to be there for an overthrow was an alternate part of the plan. We do tend to overthrow quite a bit, but that was a bonus, not necessarily the direct reason for the winger to be in that spot.

The reason for our overthrows — and messy lineouts in general — is that we don’t really have explosive jumpers or lifters. Without Porter in the team to compensate for our generally slow jumpers, we are uniquely exposed to teams with tall counter-launches, as Japan did with Dearns, Hockings and Gunter.

Japan knew this, and had Dearns or Hockings in the air on most of our lineouts. They know — as everyone does — that we need middle and tail ball to get our launch plays running the way we want them, so any lineout play we run can be disrupted by competition in that spot.

On the lineout that led to Japan’s first try, you can see a classic Irish over-compliction. Beirne and Conan act as a double feint to throw off Dearns, who is going on the release of the ball, not the lineout action.

Ryan goes to the spot that was meant to trigger Dearns, but Jansen — who I think Ireland like because he’s a good lifter, among other things — got a little too close to Ryan on the jump, so he couldn’t get the right extension on the backlift.

Ryan missed the window, and the ball sailed over the top.

In general, we struggled to get away from Dearns, in particular, as the game progressed. He spooked us into two crooked throws — one of them quite costly. We did get a workaround for the tail gun winger by going to the front and using Jansen or McCloskey to win that mismatch collision and then box exit.

But that isn’t how we like to play. It means we have to go off-script into an aerial battle that is, by default, something of a lottery, and it blocks out time where we’re trying to get back into system, as opposed to playing in transition naturally.

Japan had a few moments where they fumbled the ball chasing after Ireland’s ruck pillar fold with specifically designed plays. That might have been painful, with a little more accuracy.

At 26-20, it felt like this game could really go anywhere. Japan were doing enough at the set piece on the isolated breakdowns we produce quite often to take the game deep into the last ten minutes, but their bench didn’t really have a ton of impact, and they started to leak penalties and position.

We outlasted them, in the end, as opposed to dominantly putting them away, which might be the source of the unease. I think the reality is that we’re not a more naturally talented team than Japan when it comes down to it. We beat them with consistency and hard work, despite their ability to disrupt our start-up plays, and maybe that’s the problem.

This isn’t a Rotated Ireland vs Main Ireland problem, so much as it’s a System VS Teams Who Know How We Want To Play problem. I think it shows why Gibson Park is so important to this team; not that Casey or Doak or Frawley played poorly, it’s that he seems to be the only player with license to move off the system when it’s on, and comfortably live with the mistakes that come after it.

It’s fine to say that Casey, Frawley, Doak or any other halfback that isn’t Gibson Park should have that licence to make mistakes, but that isn’t how it works with Andy Farrell as head coach. If those guys make a mistake trying something off script, they get dropped, thrown under the bus post-game if they’re particularly unlucky, and raked over the coals in the post-game review. That’s a fact. They learn not to do it again. Gibson Park does not have that fear because, like other people in Farrell’s Circle of Trust, he can do no wrong, even when maybe two out of five of his adjustments mid-game come off as imagined.

Casey couldn’t survive 2/5. Frawley couldn’t either. Neither could Prendergast, in reality, nor Crowley or Harry Byrne. So you stick to the base system.

In a way, you can see why Ireland have struggled with the elite sides in the game at the moment, regardless of what the World Rankings say. We’re a system team, with clearly identifiable and disruptable starter points, but no x-factor. If you stop our system, or stymie it, you will have a great chance of beating Ireland if you take your chances, regardless of your level.

Eden Park will tell us a lot.

Players	Rating
1. Tom O’Toole	★★
2. Ronan Kelleher	★★
3. Tom Clarkson	★★
4. James Ryan	★★
5. Tadhg Beirne	★★
6. Jack Conan	★★★
7. Nick Timoney	★★★
8. Sean Jansen	★★★
9. Craig Casey	★★★
10. Ciaran Frawley	★★★
11. Jacob Stockdale	★★
12. Stuart McCloskey	★★★★
13. Robbie Henshaw	★★
14. Jimmy O’Brien	★★★
15. Jamie Osbourne	★★★
16. Tom Stewart	★★★
17. Billy Bohan	★★★
18. Sam Illo	★★★
19. Cormac Izuchukwu	★★★
20. Bryn Ward	★★
21. Nathan Doak	★★★
22. Harry Byrne	★★
23. Bundee Aki	★★★