Flannery's jersey presentation to players proves inspirational

OF ALL the things said and done in the build-up to Saturday’s win, it quickly became abundantly clear the jersey presentation by Jerry Flannery at Friday’s tea-time captain’s meeting was uppermost amongst them.

Emotionally, it ticked all the boxes, though Gordon D’Arcy was reluctant to describe it as a clever move, more a brave one by the departing Flannery himself.

“It was an incredibly unlucky injury to a fantastic guy and for him to stand up in front of his peers . . . it’s easy to go out in front of 60 or 70,000 people and play, to stand up in a room of 40 of your peers and present jerseys when you know you’re going home, that shows real balls. It is inspirational and it brought the team together and if you ask the other 29 guys, they’d tell you they’d prefer he was staying here and not making that presentation.”

The sense of obligation to Flannery extended to the fans; D’Arcy likening it to a home match. “Look how far we are from Ireland and (how many) people are here. People living in New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong and places like that, that are making the effort to come here. So it’s great for us to be able to repay that bit of faith. We get support no matter where we go in Europe or down in the Southern Hemisphere and it’s great to be able to repay that intensity the fans gave us and we gave it back to them today.”

He also likened the performance to Ireland’s win over England but a key difference, D’Arcy noted, is the World Cup doesn’t end now. “Now we can kick on, yeah. We’ve got Russia next week, that will be a different set of challenges so we’ve just got to back it up. There were a lot of words this week and we backed it up with a physical performance, we backed our words with actions. I think there’ll probably be a lot less talking this week and more onus on the actual physical action of doing what we do best.”

For the younger players this, undoubtedly, had been their finest day in a green jersey. There was satisfaction and maybe even a little relief in rewarding the fans’ loyalty, home and abroad, and vindication for themselves as well as proving one or two of their louder critics wrong. “I just had a good feeling in me, it’s just a feeling, you just know that whatever happens you’re going to win,” revealed Keith Earls.

“I’m just delighted we proved a lot of people wrong, you know? We always had belief in ourselves, we knew our potential. There is always hype about the Southern Hemisphere teams, the way they run the ball and stuff like that, people enjoy watching them. We knew, we spoke about it all week, the emotion of Jerry (Flannery) giving us out our jerseys, we knew we weren’t going to lose it.”

The umbilical cord with the support was always likely to be inspiring as well. “It was massive, running out onto the pitch and all these Irish people roaring and shouting, really passionate people,” said Earls. “Just the way things are at home; a lot of people are travelling abroad. It’s not just for ourselves, it’s for the whole country, Limerick and Dublin, all over Ireland. It’s great.

“That’s up there. Beating Australia in a World Cup has never been done before, it’s massive, Lads are saying it’s like like Italia 90 or USA 94, now I know what it feels like, hearing the Ole Ole Ole outside, it’s one of those brilliant matches, it’s definitely up there but there’s a long way to go.”

Amid the post-match mayhem, he had still not been able to contact his father, Ger, who was amongst the crowd.

“I’m trying to ring him, and he’s ringing me, I keep missing him,” he said, before adding with a smile: “He’s probably in a church somewhere praying, he would be more nervous than me.”

Now the trick will be in making sure this is not another one-off. “Yeah, definitely,” agreed Earls, as they all did. “We just have to concentrate on Russia, and Italy could be a potential bogey team as well, we struggled against them in the Six Nations, but hopefully all going well, two more results and we could have Wales or Samoa in the quarter-finals . . . but we won’t think that far ahead yet.”

The Wallabies, and some of their younger element particularly, appeared overconfident during the week but Les Kiss, one of two Aussies in the Irish coaching ticket along with Alan Gaffney, said: “I don’t know if it was complacency. They probably didn’t expect the continuation of that pressure throughout the whole game, that probably surprised them a little bit. Our guys wouldn’t let them attack that space, they just kept going and made their own.”

Kiss could scarcely conceal his contentment at keeping his potent compatriots tryless, and the “choke tackle” technique developed under his watch yielded three turnovers and slowed down their ball. “It was interesting, we knew the tackle zone would be important and having that capacity to do that, it’s one of the weapons we have . . . Three to four times when they had platforms to attack and create plays which they are dangerous on and we snuffed it out straight away which from my perspective was very pleasing.”

Kiss added: “It’s important we don’t get caught up in the fact we’ve done the job this weekend. Next week we have got to keep the boys fresh. It’s important not only physically but mentally and tactically to keep them fresh.