Ambition and belief, it's all back

IRELAND HAVE had huge one-off performances before. In fact, last season’s Six Nations was arguably the first in a decade in which they didn’t scale the heights at least once and Wales’ clinical opening defence of their crown in Murrayfield yesterday was a reminder that the mountain top is a bit away yet. But at least Ireland are on a high again and move on to Rome with the Big Mo – momentum.

The degree to which this team’s confidence had drained away had taken Declan Kidney and his coaching staff by surprise last November. To rediscover such belief and ambition was a tribute to the Irish Brains Trust, for there’s no way on earth they’d have beaten this French team last season or even last November. This team needed a big win like this and, though it might sound a little trite, the rest of us did too.

“The country needed that and to their credit it was a great performance,” said a delighted Taoiseach Brian Cowen in the tunnel alongside the Croke Park dressing-rooms. “I was only just saying to someone that it was the best match I’ve seen here in a couple of years. Well done to them.”

Studded with outstanding passages of play, five quality tries, contested hard but fairly and littered with high-class individual performances, it served as an antidote to the country’s ills, the weather and much of the dross that has been bestowed on rugby supporters this season. Revelling in the Saturday evening kick-off and escapism from around-the-clock doom and gloom on our airwaves, Irish fans were, by and large, thrilled and even the many thousands of French fans appeared to head into the night as content with their weekend as losing fans can be.

The big men had big games and Les Bleus were inestimably more cohesive and dynamic than the experimental side of last season. They had more possession, more territory, made Ireland make more tackles and were generally prepared to have a go from anywhere. Perhaps they could have found a bit more of a balance, but Ireland had to bounce off the ropes repeatedly.

To go with their resilience, Ireland rediscovered a level of ambition not seen in yonks. The Munster foot soldiers carried on from their Euro exploits and to go with Jamie Heaslip’s all-round Action Man heroics the Leinster backs rediscovered their va-va voom too. The captain’s try – his 33rd for his country – was classic Brian O’Driscoll. In that and much else – not least his defensive reading, work-rate and tackling – he led from the front. He’s not chopped liver just yet.

Wherever this performance came from, Kidney echoed Ronan O’Gara’s view that something had been brewing all week. “This may be hindsight but for the first time ever I felt that they were going okay since Tuesday’s training. On Tuesday night I said we’re not in such a bad place now. I’ve never, ever felt like that before.”

In his own inestimably modest way, the coach was in a state-of-the-nation mode. “The way things are now, we are very conscious that times are changing, it’s not easy and that puts more onus, more pressure on us. That’s why we do take it seriously as to who we represent. We’re going to try to do that to the best of our ability. For the supporters, people watching at home, I’m delighted for them.”

Everybody was praised for their contribution, from the under-age and schools’ coaches (Stephen Ferris’ mentor at Friends, Barney McGonigle, was given specific mention) through the clubs, to the provinces, to Gert Smal and Les Kiss, and Kidney also gave a large chunk of credit for the first try to the video analyst Mervyn Murphy, who had spotted that France were defending a little narrowly.

Ireland also appeared to apply a bit more depth to their running game, although they could have trusted themselves to keep the ball in hand more, and the mixed kicking of the Munster halves invited the French to counter-attack. Kidney effectively admitted as much when commenting: “Ball in hand we were better than in November, but we can still make some improvements with that. Field position was the thing that probably caught us, we were controlling ball in hand in and around rucks so there was a fair amount of box-kicking from the nine and we know we won’t get away with that every week, and we’ll have to look at changing that.

“That’s a case of getting the mixture right between the forwards doing some work and the backs taking a little bit more pressure off them – I’m not talking about the half-backs but everybody fronting up and looking for the ball at the relevant time,” he stressed.

“I think actually there’s a lot of improvements that we can make but they’re not going to be quick improvements. But sometimes you do make an actual step and from November to today, we did do one. But the improvements mightn’t be as great next week.”

That is assuredly true, and Ireland teams have been, perhaps, more vulnerable than most when trying to back up a performance such as this a week later. If nothing else, he’s grateful for the eight-day gap before the Roman adventure “against the team the lads have always said are the most physical in the whole competition” and hopeful that Rob Kearney (calf), Paddy Wallace (stitches to a wound above eye) and Jerry Flannery (shoulder) will be fine in what may well be an unchanged team.

Kidney ventured that Italy “will be so much better after one week together”. Their improved second-half performance against England underlined how dangerous they could be and the 39-11 scoreline is totally misleading.

For starters, Nick Mallett won’t be persisting with the utterly daft experiment of trying to convert a flanker into a Test match scrumhalf.

Poor Mauro Bergamasco was put out of his misery at half-time, but only after his selection had effectively given England a 19-point start, and thereafter the debut of Giulio Toniolatti merely made Mallett’s decision not to give him a chance in the first place even more unfathomable.