[su_dropcap style=”flat”]T[/su_dropcap]he modern rugby game is usually analysed to absolute death before anyone so much as steps on the field for the warmup. Different setups vary in their preparation but the usual routine would be to go through the opposition’s last three games to get a look at what they’re doing recently plus doing a run on the last time you played them if the timing is recent enough to be relevant.
If you have the resources, you’d also track games where your upcoming opponents played a team that you have mapped to be quite similar to your own in certain areas like the scrum, maul, lineout, or offensive/defensive set-up.
You run this analysis about a week in advance of the game so that you can adequately prepare yourself and your team with certain lineout menu options, opportunity ID off the set piece/phase play, preparing detail on their specific threats etc. It’s a lot of prep work. I should know because I do all of these for the Red Eye each week. Not to the full level of detail when it comes to actually writing the articles themselves – because who wants to know how exactly every team tends to defend close range mauls from standing and post-compete starts with 800 words and MP4s? Very few – but that level of detail is good enough to generate something of interest from an entertainment perspective.
My point is, there are no secrets anymore when it comes to styles and game plans. Everyone analyses everyone to the nth degree. That little dagger slip move with your blindside winger off a wide scrum? They saw it when you ran it last season and put it in the Gimmick Play folder they keep on you. That lineout maul feint decoy loop with the hooker doing that inside ball to the scrumhalf? They saw you try it and blow it two weeks ago but they’ll keep it on file as something you wanted to try and are likely to use again in a similar position. They saw that step thing your 10 does when he’s throwing a wide pass. Yes, that one. You’ve got to interpret and understand what you’re seeing but there’s a lot of stuff to see, is my point.
This opening game of the 2021 U20 Six Nations between Ireland and Scotland, on the other hand, was a bit like showing up to have a scrap with a guy you’ve been feuding with on Twitter in a Lidl car park.
You have a rough idea of what he’s about. He has a rough idea about what you’re about. But that’s about it. Ireland’s analysis work on Scotland couldn’t be anything other than a little speculative for this game. You’ve got a rough idea about one or two of the players from their pro-appearances but very little else of any substance. All you can know is yourself. Ireland will have learned a lot from their games against Leinster A and Munster A, in particular, and made a few assumptions based on the best information available to them.
Assumptions aren’t facts but they are your best guess based on the information you had to hand at the time.
The info I had based on the people I’d spoken to and the bits of footage I’d seen was that I was worried about Ireland’s scrum and lineout defence in general but that we’d be a handful with the ball in hand, at least against Scotland. As it turned out, the scrum in this game was absolutely superb – and a real handful on both sides of the put-in – but our maul defence was a little shaky and porous as expected. Our ball-carrying impact was pretty good too, as was our pop and organisation in defence. The games against England and Wales will be challenging, especially with our injury worries, but there was a lot to like in this bonus-point win over a game Scottish outfit.
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There was pressure on this group coming into this game. For many of these players, this was the biggest game they had ever played until this point. Sure, some were relative veterans of PRO14 games, big pressure “notice me” A games and bigger Senior Cup finals but, for a lot of guys, this was the most pressure they had been under in a game. Representing your country underage is a big deal, especially at u20 level which is a staging post for professional careers for some and the highest international honour others will ever achieve in the game, all after the most difficult of difficult years away from regular training, regular games and regular human interaction.
None of this is easy.
That’s before we get to the pressure levied on them by the performances of the two Ireland u20 groups that came before them – a Grand Slam winning side in 2019 and an undefeated 2020 side that was Grand Slam adjacent in 2020 before the pandemic hit. Nobody wants to be the team that lets that kind of record slide, even if there is very little crossover between the playing and coaching groups.
After a few watch backs of the game, I think I got a bit of a feel for what Ireland are trying to do from a phase play perspective. We seem to be running a 3-3-X/3-2-X variant with a fair bit of mobility between the forward units. I was a little surprised by the selection of Cathal Forde at #12 but it makes perfect sense in the system we seem to be playing – this is a shape that wants to get our power runners in the back three and back row attacking in wider spaces, so we need three playmaker archetype players to ensure we get a positive chain of momentum across the field.
Humphries and Corkery look pretty decent in that facilitator role at #10 – linking pods of play, essentially – but the real action in this system looks to happen that extra slot out from the first receiver.
Cathal Forde is perfect for this role. He’s got the hands and kicking variety to be an effective distributor but he’s got the size to be a carrier you have to respect.
He’s the perfect combo player in this position for this Irish system. Forde isn’t the most accurate passer or a massive threat ball-in-hand based on this evidence but he’s got enough of both in his skillset to be really effective in the position.
Shane Jennings at #13 appears to be another combo player – a good passer, good size in contact and excellent pace on the outside.
Both Forde and Jennings will operate behind that wider three pod of forwards in the 3-3-X shape and it’s on the #10s to link the pods together, stay active in the scheme and find the passes behind and through screens when called on.
When we break down our backline role set – let’s forget about what the numbers on the pack mean – we’ve got a facilitator at #10, two combo players in the second layer, two big-hitting midfielders – Moxham and Osbourne – outside them and a power winger in Josh O’Connor to shore up the other side of the line. Osbourne is a massive part of this system in that he’s got a little bit of everything – Robbie Henshaw type qualities –
This is a backline that is selected to a shape and a system.
Ireland want to create situations where Forde or Jennings can release the ball through screens to produce options for McCormack/Kendellen to run with Moxham/O’Connor/Osbourne.
This allows you to play a very direct style of rugby that takes the pressure off the #10, where I don’t think there’s a massive standout like Harry Byrne/Jack Crowley. The #10 here has to vary the play, sure, but their main task appears to be finding passes in that link position between the pods and through screens. I’d have liked to see Corkery and Humphries carry a little more here – I think that would add to their game could really open up things for this Ireland side on phase play – but if that takes away from the decent facilitation I saw here, I’d keep them as is.
My concern pre-game was our tight five/six. Not necessarily for this game but how they’d fare in this game where we might expect to have power advantage on paper if nothing else. Essentially, if we were going to struggle with Scotland physically then you could extrapolate worse things to come against the bigger teams. This is the part of the scrap in the car park where you’re eyeing up the guy’s arms to see if he works out.
From a phase play perspective, I felt we’d have enough weight in the props to set a platform if required and that mostly played out. Lasisi and Illo were really strong in contact and added real weight at the scrum. Loughnane, too, had some real pop in his ball-carrying which added a lot to our centre-field setups on second/third phase. I thought Morrissey and Sheridan did well in the second row, although I’d worry about their size and stopping power against England and France.
That said, they were part of a pretty dominant Irish scrum that consistently pressured the Scottish on both sides of the put-in. You can see Lasisi and then Boyle putting real pressure on the Scottish tighthead side here which might not be there against other sides but certainly opened up opportunities here.
Despite the positives, the middle stretch of the first half was a concern from an Irish perspective. We struggled to get hands-on the ball effectively and even though we defended pretty well, I felt our ability to kick and retain left a fair bit to be desired from the starting halfbacks. There’s also no way to extricate the result from the Scottish red card early in the second half. At that point in the game, things were quite close physically and even though Scotland ensured they had a full complement of forwards on the field after their period where they went down to 13 players, going without a player in the wider channels against this Irish side was always going to be problematic. The tries to seal the game arrived without much in the way of trouble as the half progressed and Ireland saw out the game without much issue.
This was a decent win, for sure, but bigger challenges await this group as the tournament progresses.
Notable Players
I thought this was a pretty good performance by Ireland collectively speaking. I was very impressed with Ireland’s outside backline. Forde, Jennings, Moxham, O’Connor and Osbourne have the power and size to be a problem for any backline unit in this competition if they are given the platform to attack with the depth and width they showed here.
This result was powered by a performance of the highest quality from Alex Kendellen, who looked like a senior professional Ireland had somehow managed to wrangle into this tournament. I’ll have a full GIF Room article on him this week but this performance was seriously impressive for a year one academy player.
He won turnovers, he was our top carrier, our top tackler, our top passing forward, he threw offloads… he was just so good. I could show you the offloads and the powerful carries and the superb control at the base of the scrum, and they’d be good, but they are only the highlights. You get a real look at his quality over the course of seven fairly non-descript phases.
He still has areas to work on in his game – nobody is perfect at 20 years of age – but his base game is superbly balanced. He’s technically superb, athletic, and he just gets the game. This was an excellent performance straight out of the top drawer. ★★★★★
The Wally Ratings: Scotland U20 (A)
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 |
|---|---|
| Temi Lasisi | ★★★★ |
| Ronan Loughnane | ★★★★ |
| Sam Illo | ★★★★ |
| Mark Morrissey | ★★★ |
| Harry Sheridan | ★★★ |
| Alex Soroka | ★★★ |
| Oisín McCormack | ★★★★ |
| Alex Kendellen | ★★★★★ |
| Conor McKee | ★★★ |
| James Humphries | N/A |
| Josh O'Connor | ★★★★ |
| Cathal Forde | ★★★★ |
| Shane Jennings | ★★★★ |
| Ben Moxham | ★★★★ |
| Jamie Osbourne | ★★★★ |
| Eoin de Buitléar | ★★★ |
| Jack Boyle | ★★★★ |
| Mark Donnelly | ★★★ |
| Reuben Crothers | ★★★ |
| Will Reilly | ★★★ |
| Tim Corkery | ★★★ |
| Chris Cosgrave | ★★★ |
| Donnacha Byrne | ★★★ |
