O'Sullivan sharpens his plan of attack

Interview: On the eve of the Six Nations championship Gerry Thornley talks to the Ireland coach about both his short-term aims and the challenge of the World Cup in Australia in the autumn.

In effect, Eddie O'Sullivan has been a year in charge now. Played 13, won nine, lost four. One step back initially, perhaps, to take two forward, it's been an undulating time for the Irish coach. He seems to have been hardened already by the experience. Inevitable really, for it goes with the territory of being a national team coach.

No one could question O'Sullivan's work ethic. He brings an intense commitment to the job of coaching, and that has been heightened by his elevation to the Big One. Accordingly, he wears defeats and criticism harder than most. For a while last year, and in New Zealand last summer, interviews and press conferences weren't being peppered with O'Sullivan one-liners or turns of phrases as before. His expression appeared more strained.

But, on the back of a record-equalling six successive wins, the pressure (much of it self-imposed) has been eased a little. After the win over Australia particularly, he could breathe a little more easily again.

Ask him if he's really enjoyed his first year and he says he has. "I've had good times and I've had bad times. Times when I've been very happy, times when I've been very sad almost with the way things went. But in the year I think I've built a pretty good rapport with the players and I think a belief in the squad that we're going in the right direction, and a pretty good staff around the players."

He emphasises the importance of back-up staff, and that players have had to work a good deal harder. Winning helps, though, not least in the belief that everyone is going in the right direction. Expectations are still high, though, a bit too high at times he thinks.

Well, here we go again. This, theoretically, is the schedule that best suits an Irish tilt at the title, with France and England due in Dublin.

"To think you could win a Grand Slam by beating England and France away is a huge ask," he concedes, "but it becomes a double-edged sword because if you don't win the other games away from home, your confidence can become shaky and you could be looking down the barrel of a very bad year."

At least O'Sullivan is not diluting the Six Nations with spurious talk of using it as a series of trial games for his grander vision of the World Cup. To be in any way dismissive of it would only devaluate it in Irish minds, and that would not sit well with the national psyche.

"Well, I think if you listen to Laporte, and Woodward to a lesser extent, they're taking the Six Nations for granted in the sense that they want to use it as a platform for the World Cup. I think it's a nice luxury to have, but if we don't focus on the job in hand we always do a bad job. And if we go to the World Cup having done a bad job it's not good for us."

Yet many places in the Irish team have been cast in stone, with the coach given little opportunity to look beyond the likes of John Hayes, Anthony Foley, Peter Stringer and others in certain positions. So might there not be a temptation to look beyond them now, as Laporte plans to do?

"I don't think we have that latitude. I think, really, Ireland always has to go out in a Test game and put the best team on the field, and play the best they can. It's the only way we get results. If we go into games and say, 'Well, okay, Italy would traditionally be the weaker game, let's go out and fling it around against Italy', I think that's asking for a ferocious kick in the you-know-whats.

"I think we should pick the best team we can put out bar injury or loss of form in every game. Knowing the odds, injuries will happen, it's hard to imagine them not happening."

Besides, with bugbears Scotland first up and Italy coming off a home match against Wales which might even see them buoyed by a win, both could demand Ireland's best game. Then the French come calling, hardly an ideal setting for experimentation, and if there were a championship or a Grand Slam still on the line for Ireland's penultimate game in Cardiff, with the English on the final Sunday, March 30th, it would be no time to start weakening Ireland's hand.

It wouldn't be stretching things to say that Ireland's two most important games in 2003 will be tomorrow week's in Murrayfield and the final pool game against Argentina in Adelaide on October 26th. While the latter will probably determine whether Ireland reaches the quarter-finals, the Six Nations opener has traditionally defined Ireland's campaign.

From 1989 until 2001, for 12 years in a row, Ireland lost their opening games and were thus left playing catch up, only obtaining a third place finish once, in 2000. (True, in 1993, the only year in that timespan when Ireland won two matches, it could be argued that Ireland finished joint second, though the final table has them fourth on points difference). The point is that in each of the last two seasons Ireland won their opening game and, building on that momentum, went on to finish second two seasons ago and third last season.

O'SULLIVAN goes slightly further in maintaining that the opening two matches will define Ireland's Six Nations campaign. "If we can win our first two games, which is a fairly big ask since we haven't won in Scotland for 18 years and we've always done very badly there, that would put a lot in the bank for the rest of the Six Nations.

"But if we lost those first two games it would put a lot of pressure on the squad, so my goal is to go into the Six Nations and hit it as hard as we can, and see where it takes us."

It is, as O'Sullivan says, all about momentum. Lose games and with it lose momentum, and invariably coaches are obliged to tinker with personnel, or maybe adjust scrums or team patterns. Win games, generate momentum, and those worries disappear.

Scotland, though, have three times deflated traditional Irish optimism on the eve of the championship with an opening defeat, while Ireland have lost on their last nine treks to Murrayfield in all. Nor have many of those been close games - witness the results of the last three: 38-10, 30-13 and 32-10. What is it about Murrayfield?

"I don't know the honest answer, but I've opinions and I think we've often gone to Scotland as favourites and we've always struggled as favourites in Irish rugby. That shouldn't be the case, but it seems to be the case. I think we always have a belief that we can beat Scotland, but when they get us in their back yard they seem to think they've some divine right to beat us and they've a very good coach, Ian McGeechan, who's very good at finding a weakness and on a given day exploiting it."

The thought of the Scottish silver fox and his hard-nosed sidekick Jim Telfer dastardly plotting away in some Murrayfield video room is enough to send a shiver down the spine of any opposing coach.

"I think he's going to look for a weakness in us that he's seen in the autumn somewhere. Hopefully I've seen it as well, and it'll be pistols at dawn, y'know. But traditionally we've gone to Scotland looking the better team, playing the better rugby and still come a cropper."

Scotland's three autumn wins provide an interesting yardstick. Ireland's winning margin over Fiji was 33 points bigger, but on a line through Romania there is nothing between them, while, bad and all as South Africa were last November, and decidedly dodgy though both of the Scots' tries were, the Scottish pack looked a particularly impressive unit.

With Gordon Ross applying a more prosaic, kicking outhalf presence than the mercurial Gregor Townsend, and the Scottish backline an unexceptional Test lot, they're likely to keep it tight and go for the jugular close in.

"They've a very well-drilled pack. They hang on to the ball well and they drill holes around the sides, so it's going tobe another barnstormer and if we're less than prepared or we have any false sense of security that we're going to waltz in there, based on what the provinces are doing, that's going to be the rock we perish on."

Combined with the provinces' good form, Ireland enter the Six Nations' fray on the back of a record-equalling six successive wins. The autumn wins over Australia and Argentina were an invaluable boost for the squad's confidence, as well as the defence and set-pieces, though sodden conditions militated against the planned expansion to Ireland's running game.

"I suppose there were advantages and disadvantages to that. The advantage is that nobody has seen what we tried to do. The disadvantage is that we haven't tried it yet, so we've got to find out.

"I would hope that for the Six Nations we would continue being a better defensive team, and I still think we got caught a few times in the autumn but were lucky.

"I hope our set piece will continue to develop because I think it will have to. We'd like our scrum not to be just solid any more but try and become an attacking scrum to put some pressure on teams, and to still continue building our variations in the lineout so that we go through a series of games without giving our hand away."

Most of all though, O'Sullivan wants to develop Ireland's attacking game, so that they keep the ball in hand longer and become even more threatening, all the while being mindful that, come the World Cup, the ball and the ground will be dry.

A good Six Nations? "We're regarded as third in the pack and if we end up third again I'd be very happy. If we finish second in the Six Nations it would be great, and if we end up fourth I'd be disappointed."

Even then, Ireland have another 10 games lined up in 2003, and that's not counting the hoped-for knock-out stages of the World Cup. It is a massive year for O'Sullivan and Ireland.

"I don't think I'll ever again face a year like this - 11 Tests before Rugby World Cup and then the devil take the hindmost. It's a daunting prospect, but an exciting one I have to say."