Ireland 57 Italy 6

A bizarre game played out in front of a bemused crowd

For a game that was functionally over as a contest after 20 minutes, it wasn't too bad but it's hard to take anything from a game so marred by a completely correct red card.

Match Quality

Match Intensity

Match Importance

Quality of Opposition

3

Damp Squib

As a spectacle, this game sucked. I was sitting in the stands for this one and parts of the game were so bland and consequence-free the section to my right tried to get a Mexican wave going. Thankfully it didn’t catch on – think of the embarrassment of having an actual Mexican Wave in <current year> – but it was a consequence of watching what was, essentially, a 60-minute training run thanks to Hame Faiva’s reckless red card that forced Italy to go down to 14 men and then, as soon as a scrum was called and Italy had no suitable replacements, 13 men.

Where did this law come from?

First of all, have a look at the actual literature here. That’s the actual technicalities of the law but why was it brought in? To understand that, we have to go back to 2008. Ian McGeechan’s Wasps side have just won the Premiership by beating Leicester Tigers. The game and, indeed, Wasps run to the final that year was not without controversy. In the semi-final against Bath a week prior, Wasps had been the “cause, and sole beneficiary, of uncontested scrums” and then, in the final, the same thing happened again right as Leicester began to turn the screw at the set-piece generating penalties and a platform Wasps couldn’t live with. Then, all of a sudden, Wasps props limped off and, with no suitable replacements on the bench, the referee called for uncontested scrums. Leicester’s advantage in the game as it headed into the last 20 minutes was gone and Wasps saw out the final from there.

Then, at the start of the next season, the same thing happened AGAIN with Wasps winning a game against Leicester where wouldn’t you know it, they suffered more injuries in the front row when their scrum was under pressure and the game was forced into uncontested scrums. They won the game.

Remember, at that stage, you could only have seven replacements on the bench and most teams would have a hooker and a prop that could cover both sides. If you had more than two injuries in the front row, uncontested scrums were a certainty and it happened more often than you probably remember. It would change to eight replacements from 2009/10.

But there was a solution already proposed to truly punish the sides that go to uncontested scrums.

You can see it in that match report on the Premiership final from 2008.

Had the International Rugby Board done its job two years ago, rugby would not have made a mockery of itself in front of the biggest crowd ever to watch a club match. In 2006, the English wanted to embrace a system developed in France under which a team causing uncontested scrums spent the remainder of the game playing a man short. It was, everyone agreed, a sensible, workable solution. Everyone, that is, except the IRB, who blocked it on the grounds that the sport could not have different sets of laws in different parts of the world. Since then, of course, the IRB has gone out of its way to introduce different sets of laws in different parts of the world.

The laws changed in 2009 when the then IRB stated that each replacement bench should have three specialist front rows and also brought in this law to double down the punishment on teams who cause uncontested scrums. When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. The scrum is meant to be a massive attacking platform so when the opposition takes that away from you because they are unable to scrummage safely, there should be a punishment for that. Without that law, the defending side can spring off the side of dud scrums with no concern for scrummaging on their prop or going backwards.

I think we’re so used to the scrum running at 95%+ completion to the attacking side that the idea that it should be a live contest for the ball and an area that decides the game is almost archaic in 2022. No scrum no win? Only in the most radical of circumstances that are so radical that outlier games where the scrum does decide the game stand out like a sore thumb. If we want the scrum to be a driver of the game, we have to punish sides who cause uncontested scrums, no matter how painful it is to the spectacle of the game.

So why did Italy have to play with 13 men for 60 minutes? Blame Ian McGeechan’s 2008/2009 Wasps side.

I’m only half-serious.

♛  ♛  ♛

I don’t fully buy the idea that Andy Farrell will have learned nothing from this game.

Sure, it was a training game from the 20th minute on and an exercise in how many points Ireland could stick on a committed Italian outfit, but there was some important stuff here if you knew what to look for.

My main takeaway is that this pack build – or pack builds like it – do not allow Ireland to play to the potential that we’ve shown against New Zealand and Wales. But our attacking performance in those two games – and France’s defensive performance against Ireland’s attack two weeks ago – will not go unnoticed by opposition analysts. Wales’ big mistake was assuming that Ireland’s attack can be met with raw numbers that flood offensive channels. Ireland blew Wales away once the offside line was established (and refereed) and they had very little for us in the end.

France realised that Ireland’s “league” style attack doesn’t work with slower ruck recycling because without that ever-advancing offside line, opposition defences can then swamp our passing lanes and pressure our ability to get the ball to width.

If you slow Ireland at the breakdown, you remove loop runners as an undefendable threat and give your edge defenders licence to attack our layered runners.

This means that you need heavy leather in the close range collisions to set up the kind of quick, concussive ruck points that allow Ireland to nail teams to an offside line and allow the layers and looped runners to go to work. Against Italy, we seemed to drift away from the first principle of our usual attacking strategy in favour of a style that tried to take advantage of our “lighter” pack build.

We ran more ball off #10 than we necessarily should have, in my opinion.

You can see some rucks in there that were, technically, that prime quick ball – sub 3 seconds – but with Italy uncommitted to the ruck point, the expected space wasn’t there. Without the dominant collisions in quick succession, our depth often wasn’t what it needed to be either.

Carbery has taken a lot of flak after the game but I think most of it is unwarranted. He was far from his best here – a little too on-script for me – but you can’t tell me that he made a tonne of errors during phase play or poor passing decisions. Poor kicking off the tee by his standards? Absolutely. But the idea that he had some error-ridden game

My biggest bugbear was that he didn’t kick the ball often enough, especially when Italy were reduced to 13 but he wasn’t really helped by sub-par hitting options on his inside and outside shoulder. Lowe’s pocket running was often ill-timed and out of step with Carbery’s advance lines, while I doubt Robbie Henshaw has ever had a less effective game in an Irish jersey.

Sexton had a good impact when he came on the field when he converted a scrum gimmick we’d run earlier in the game.

But the idea that he was streets better than Carbery is wide of the mark, for me. After that first try a few minutes after coming off the bench, all the other scores came from a charge-down and when Italy were reduced down to 12 men for the last five minutes. Sexton ran into much the same issues that Carbery did with average enough work outside him and non-dominant collisions in front of him for the most part.

I thought our flow of possession beyond Carbery was a problem and that’s why I think Bundee Aki was a big miss from this game at #12. His mixture of physicality, breakdown impact and the quality of his passing are key to Ireland performing at the level we aspire to. James Lowe really upped his passing involvements as that “third midfielder” but I don’t think we were any better off for it as the game played out.

Despite all this, Ireland still won by 51 points and never looked in any danger of losing this or even failing to earn the bonus point, even before the red card incident that took all the sting out of the game. Ireland did labour, though, and until we can get Ryan and/or Henderson back on the field we’re going to look a little lightweight in the tight exchanges. By far the biggest issue, for me, is that the opposition now understands where and how our attacking system works. Can we respond to the heavy breakdown pressure that is coming from England? That’s where the challenge is for Ireland to push beyond the attacking plateau of the last two rounds. The developing sideshow at #10 is just that – a sideshow. Until we are blowing past the breakdown roadblocks opposition teams are throwing in our way, we will continue to labour if we continue to play with this amount of possession.

The Wally Ratings: Italy (H)

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.