Ireland were abysmal here.
But I don’t think that matters.
There’s no way to write those words without them sounding like “LOL just a friendly, didn’t matter” but I can’t control that. I can only tell you what I think. There comes a point in a game like this – for me it was the 39th minute – when a player becomes very aware of the context of this game. Cian Healy went down with an ankle injury in the 39th minute – how serious remains to be seen – and Ireland barely fired a shot thereafter. Ireland looked tired, listless, off the boil… look, think of a preseason negative adjective and chances are it’ll apply to this performance. Was it an ominous portent of what’s to come in Japan? Or was it a meaningless blowout in a meaningless warm-up game?
Maybe it’s both.
Either way, the scoreline isn’t acceptable. Conceding 50 points plus hasn’t happened to Ireland since that All Blacks game back in 2012 and, warm-up game or not, it is cause for concern in its own right. It won’t matter one bit if Ireland beat Scotland in Yokohama but this result has turned up the heat on the camp ahead of the final warm-up games against Wales. When preseason friendlies are under this kind of microscope, you can only imagine what the pressure will be like once September rolls around. There’s the perception – whether it’s real or not – that this is a team on the slide and results like this only further that narrative.
So where did it all go wrong?
The first quarter wasn’t great but it was as good as it got for Ireland in this game. After sneaking ahead through a nicely taken try off a Henderson maul strip, Ireland lost the lead from a simple error in defence off an English scrum.
Jacob Stockdale has been eating a lot of the blame for this but I don’t see what other option he had on the edge of this defensive set.
Jacob has to bite on this line and gets done, but he has no option. Either way, he’s in trouble because of what’s happened inside him.
Byrne and Aki have been sat down by Farrell’s line, with George Ford sliding out the back from Youngs and with Johnny May cruising in the second layer. Ringrose sits down on Tuilagi’s hard attack line – understandable, in context – and that leaves Stockdale defending a 3 on 1 isolation.
In reality, the damage was done from the scrum.
Conor Murray didn’t track Youngs, which created the 4-2 isolation in the 10 channel. Why? He saw that Peter O’Mahony had driven in scrummaging on the blindside and feared Vunipola breaking off the back of the scrum and having a one on one with Jordan Larmour.
Larmour, too, was convinced of Vunipola’s intentions and moved to the blindside of the scrum, away from tracking May. That created a domino effect of isolations that England did well to execute.
Once the ball came to Cockinsinga from Daly, it was a try bar a catastrophic error.
Ireland took the lead from a Byrne penalty a few minutes later but lost it to a well taken Daly try.
The gainline won by Tuilgai in the collision with Ringrose made this try. Once the ball hits Ford, Stockdale and Kearney have to attack the pass but get beaten by the ball. Were Ireland too narrow here? You can be as narrow as you like but if you eat gainline this close to the try line, you’ll concede eventually. Stockdale is the fall guy again here, but he was defending a 3 on 1 with Kearney on the cover. It was the collision lost to Tuilagi that did the damage.
Before halftime, England added another off a close-range scrum. Nigel Owens’ excellent blocking line on Aki, coupled with a slight miscalculation by Byrne, had Stockdale defending a two on one 5 metres from his own try line with Manu Tuilagi.
Wait for everyone to tell you how sTocKdaLe’S dEfEnSe iS a LiAbiLitY.
His missed reads were just a symptom of problems elsewhere – namely the Irish lineout. I’ll have a feature on the problems with the lineout coming on Sunday if you can stomach it but the position we conceded in the build-up to the above scrum came from a blown defensive lineout off a needlessly complex call.
Henderson’s lift feint (or lack thereof) on O’Mahony blew this scheme because when O’Mahony wasn’t a target at 2, all Kruis had to do was look at Kleyn’s lifting position to gamble on a jump.
There’s an element of self-scouting in our call choices – making certain call decisions in positions that we wouldn’t do against Scotland, for example – but that might be a little too kind on the guys making the choices. This isn’t a dumb team but we made some dumb call decisions against a team with only two counter jumpers.
It’s not just the schemes that caused us trouble; our throwing was poor too.
This throw is “fat” – slow and wobbling all over the place – and it gave Itoje all the time he needed to get a counter-launch in place. There’s a rake of them from this game so I’ll save your bandwidth and mine by keeping them to myself for the moment.
In Ireland’s defence, we seem to have introduced a few new schemes from the Six Nations and had a real tough time nailing all the small percentage points that turn your lineout from a reliable platform to the disaster vending machine it became here.
Ireland looked like a side that was just back from a week of hot, hard work in the Portuguese sun. We were leggy, sloppy and blowing hard inside the first 40 minutes. England, by contrast, were sharp, physical and looked further along the road physically than we did. That isn’t to say that the loss can be blamed on tired legs and sunburn – far from it. Our breakdown work was sloppy and our pods poorly structured. A good carry was often turned into a bad carry because of the accuracy of the clean out.
Best needed to wait this out as the second man but he wasn’t where he needed to be – something you could credibly accuse all 23 Irish players of. You could see what we were trying to do, at times.
A tight pod like the above example was to lead to width and Irish numbers. Essentially, Ireland were looking to secure ball and minimal gainline off a heavy pod of three before getting the ball to an overloaded strike zone. Here’s a quick example.
Furlong was running a chopping line on the fringe defence to “break the link” between the pillar defence and the rest of the English line speed. Josh Van Der Flier’s poor depth on Ringrose’s possession killed this move.
Just half a metre of depth gives Ringrose a corner to work with and we could have well seen Larmour get this ball with space and time to work with.
Instead, Ringrose had to truck it up and the chance was gone. You could see from our attacking shape that we were going for more width than we would traditionally go with (based on the last few years) but the accuracy wasn’t there at the ruck – or at halfback – to fully realise it.
We’re holding a lot of our kicking strategies back based on the evidence presented here. There were no offensive box kicks from Murray or McGrath, for example, and Byrne did his best to vary the attack when kicking from first receiver but didn’t get the accuracy. He had a poor enough game – along with Murray prior to his HIA removal – but I don’t think we’re playing our full hand with what we’ve been training with. These aren’t mythical “strike movez” that are going to blow away Scotland, New Zealand or South Africa but they are elements of our game that we have yet to see in this pre-season. The accuracy has to improve for them to be worth the planning, though. You know, I know it, the squad knows it.
Will that accuracy come with time? Maybe. It’s not a guarantee. On the one hand, time certainly helped Wales and Scotland after their losses to England and France respectively early in their preparation. On the other, if the squad can’t shift the malaise and sloppiness that characterised this record defeat then who knows what will happen in our “quarter-final before the quarter-final” against Scotland? Momentum is an annoying x-factor in squad preparation and when you don’t have it, it’s like playing in wet concrete.
The next two games just became a lot more important.
The Wally Ratings: England (A) Guinness Summer Series
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 |
|---|---|
| Cian Healy | ★★ |
| Rory Best | ★ |
| Tadhg Furlong | ★★ |
| Iain Henderson | ★★ |
| Jean Kleyn | ★★ |
| Peter O'Mahony | ★★ |
| Josh Van Der Flier | ★★ |
| CJ Stander | ★★ |
| Conor Murray | ★ |
| Ross Byrne | ★ |
| Jacob Stockdale | ★★ |
| Bundee Aki | ★★ |
| Garry Ringrose | ★★ |
| Jordan Larmour | ★★ |
| Rob Kearney | ★★ |
| Sean Cronin | ★★ |
| Jack McGrath | ★★★ |
| Andrew Porter | ★★★ |
| Devin Toner | ★★★ |
| Tadhg Beirne | ★★★ |
| Luke McGrath | ★★★ |
| Jack Carty | ★★★ |
| Andrew Conway | ★★★ |
There’s much to cover in this game and I’ll be doing that in TRK Premium all week long with GIF and Video Articles.
