Kidney points to set-piece threat

GERRY THORNLEY, Rugby correspondent

RUGBY: FRANCE v IRELAND COUNTDOWN: VISITS TO the Irish squad’s base in Carton House to hear Declan Kidney’s team announcements can often seem like Groundhog Day, but even more so when he actually confirms the same team and replacements to play the same opponents for the second time in three weeks. We truly have been here before.

There’s also only so many times you can ask about mental blocks and losing sequences against the French in Paris, or anywhere come to think of it.

Nonetheless, if this was the line-up earmarked for the postponed game, then it made complete sense to stick with it for the rearranged one next Sunday at Stade de France.

Meanwhile, Philippe Saint-André has made two changes to the starting XV which played against Scotland, and had been pencilled in for the original rendezvous with Ireland.

As expected, Clement Poitrenaud replaces his injured teammate Maxime Medard, while Louis Picamoles’s ballast and offloading have been sacrificed for the rangy lineout expertise of Julien Bonnaire.

The word from the French camp prior to the postponed game had been that they were going to attack the Irish lineout, and with Bonnaire in tandem with Imanol Harinordoquy, that appears even more the case now.

Dimitri Szarzewski’s darts have been retained, while there had also been speculation that Lionel Beauxis might start ahead of François Trinh-Duc.

However, Saint-André said he opted for “continuity”, which must have had French scribes reaching for their Roget’s Thesaurus after Marc Lièvremont’s 43-match reign, given he used 82 players and waited until game 41 to announce an unchanged team for the first time. In an odd way, they must miss Monsieur Tinkerman.

Acknowledging the longer kicking game of Beauxis, Saint-André explained: “I wanted to continue seeing Morgan (Parra) and François together in their playmaking, conserving the ball and the man-on-man defence. I really wanted to retain this 10, 12, 13; they need the get a feel for each other.”

The return of a highly motivated Poitrenaud from the wilderness – one quick-witted and elusive game-breaking fullback for another, albeit with a weaker kicking game and more unpredictable nature – hardly diminishes the threat posed by the French off turnovers, a factor which was reinforced by Medard’s try against the Scots.

“If you look at their two games, against Italy, they were more clinical there,” observed Kidney. “They were willing to defend and soak up and then the minute Italy made a mistake they pounce and they get their four tries.

“It was pretty much similar against Scotland too,” added the coach, who is expecting “a massive improvement” from the French after the momentum of two wins.

“You don’t get to a World Cup final without being as good as they are. They’re a classy side and they’ll have learned a bit from last week. But if you don’t concentrate for 80 minutes and you switch off it only takes them 10 seconds to run the length of the pitch and score.”

Kidney noted the sharpened threat at set-piece time, a point emphasised by Paul O’Connell in relation to the Scotland outing.

“They had a lot of confidence in their scrum. I don’t think they tapped and went with any of the free-kicks they were awarded, they went for the scrum every time. They looked to make ground or get penalties.

“That’s a massive part of their game, with Yannick Bru coaching the forwards.

“They didn’t get as much ball as they would have liked but when they were given half a chance, they looked incredibly dangerous. Whenever Scotland scored, they looked like they had another gear to into. That’s more reflective of the France team we’re likely to see this weekend.”

O’Connell stressed that the breakdown is even more influential than the set-piece nowadays, an area the Scots flooded and countered to sharper effect last Sunday than Ireland have in their two games to date.

“If the first man in there can be accurate, on your ball or their ball, it can make a monumental difference to what happens outside you. Every team is working so hard on the breakdown and every player from 1 to 15 has to be good no matter who has the ball. We speak about it all the time because it’s the centre-piece of the whole game now.”

In Ireland’s last five Parisian sorties in the Six Nations, the average losing margin has been 19, but the half-time deficit has been just shy of 17. In other words, the damage has been done by the interval, which made Kidney’s discourse on Ireland’s latest flaws in exit strategy in the first half against Italy all the more relevant.

He attributed Ireland again playing too much rugby in their own half to over-exuberance.

“Rugby can be a simple enough game if you want to make it so. There’s usually a better chance of scoring if you start from inside their half rather than outside. But you have to have the courage sometimes to go after it as well then too.”

Indeed, recall the lineout move from the Irish 10-metre line which ended with the opening try by Jamie Heaslip in the 2009 win in Croke Park.

“Sometimes the very first ball you get will be the best ball you’ll get all match, so you have to have the courage to be open to do that, but you also have to have the wisdom to know ‘well, no, maybe we’re better off getting a bit of field position’. It’s a measure between having the courage to go after it but the wisdom to know when.”

But Kidney admitted this had to be coupled with the required levels of adrenaline to cope with the game’s physicality. “That’s quite a mixture for the body to cope with. I think that’s where the challenge is and nowhere more so than in Test rugby.”

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