A colleague on this newspaper asked on Friday if Ireland would be able to avoid the wooden spoon in this Six Nations. While the sound of a hopping ball could be heard clearly across the Irish Sea, nevertheless it illustrates two things: the tight lanes on the championship highway mean that accidents put you out of the race; and Ireland no longer prompt questions about how they can cruise along on the fast track.
The standard line in Camp Ireland has been that they are not far off the pace even though they lie fifth in the table with a solitary point, one more than their opponents on Saturday in Dublin: Italy. A draw; defeat by a point; defeat by two scores: it supports the theory that a team who last season were winning without exactly running their opponents off the park have slowed only slightly to be a close second in two of three races so far.
Their target now is a mid-table finish, which is where – at the start of the tournament – most of us expected them to be. To achieve that much, however, they will need to remap their way around the lineout, a phase that has let them down so far. It cost them the game at Twickenham two weeks ago.
“We had a good plan going into it but all credit to [George] Kruis, he kind of second-guessed me,” said Devin Toner, who was calling the shots out of touch for Ireland that day – and will be again against Italy. “A lot of the time it’s a bit of guesswork – like sometimes he stayed and sometimes he went in front of me.
“So he did very well to defend it but obviously I’ve been looking back over what went wrong and looking at how Italy defend and [we’ll] build another plan. For every different game you have different plans and different formulas to go into it, so I’ve just been studying, basically.”
And when the plans go awry, as they did against England? “Yeah, well I think with hookers as well as second-rows and callers, if you lose a lineout it kind of always eats at you, to be honest,” Toner said. “But I think over the years you learn that if a couple don’t go your way then it’s not the end of the world. We know we’ve a good lineout. We’ve got good processes, so I think it’s just being able to put it behind us and move on, to be honest.”
At nearly 88% efficiency Italy’s performance out of touch has been decent enough over the three rounds, but it has not kept them out of the basement battle that has been their traditional slot in 16 and a half campaigns of Six Nations rugby.
Despite Ireland’s struggles, the chances of that changing are remote. The injury issues continued for Joe Schmidt, the head coach, with the withdrawal of replacement Cian Healy. Choosing Finlay Bealham – a tighthead who can play loose as well – ahead of James Cronin and Dave Kilcoyne or indeed his club-mate Dennis Buckley, was a strange call. But given that it is Italy, it will probably not matter.
