Gatland seeks redemption road

The full-time whistle had scarcely sounded. Ireland's World Cup had ended ingloriously. Warren Gatland hadn't had time to share a thought with anybody, even with Donal Lenihan alongside him, whereupon an RTE linkman requested a pitch-side interview.

Words came out of his mouth, he thinks, before IRFU press officer John Redmond butted in and asked that the coach have a couple of minutes before the interview took place. He needed months, not minutes.

Just then, and in the post-match press conference that followed, Gatland looked dazed, as if in a semi-conscious state. The next day the Irish squad packed their bags, returned to Dublin, picked up their gear in the Berkeley Court Hotel and had a funereal lunch. Before he knew it, Warren Gatland was back at home with Trudy and the kids in Galway.

"Trudy had a couple of friends over from New Zealand and for a couple of days I wasn't too enthusiastic about getting out of bed. Didn't really want to talk or have much of a conversation. After about three of four days a friend said something and I smiled, and she said: `Oh, you do smile, do you?' For me it was unbelievably disappointing and it's still something I think about quite a bit."

It was the ultimate video nasty at first, but eventually he went through it a couple of times.

"I thought we played pretty well for 60 minutes. A couple of things didn't go our way in the first half, but there was a point when we had them on the ropes. I find it difficult to analyse why in the last 15 to 20 minutes we went to pieces so much. We lost a bit of confidence, went from one mistake to the next, and the number of penalties the referee was giving in the match didn't help the continuity of it, but the last 20 minutes were the most disappointing 20 minutes of rugby I've ever witnessed or ever been involved with.

"Then when we came back there was an absolute crisis in Irish rugby. I share the disappointment of people, but if you just look at Argentina, they were pretty unlucky not to beat Wales, they beat Samoa and Japan, and put up a good performance against France. Had we won that game like we should have done, the reaction would have been that we were going in the right direction."

He refuses to give a completely bleak review of the World Cup, even if the last 20 minutes is the abiding memory.

"Hopefully the players have learnt a lot from it. For us, we're still trying to establish that confidence, that self-belief. It's something that I think Munster players have shown particularly well this year. They haven't crumbled under pressure and I think in the last 20 minutes against Argentina, and at other times, we've looked pretty vulnerable." In addressing that mental flaw, Ireland have focussed much of their attention on recreating match situations in training, the hope being that players become more used to making decisions under pressure.

Hence the value of more pressurised, week-in, week-out European matches, even if this still falls short of the Super 12 equivalent in the Southern Hemisphere, where players "have learnt the importance of patience, of making decisions under pressure, of not panicking".

"I think we've improved in this area, but not significantly enough," he adds.

Aside from infusing the team with some new blood, Gatland is looking for Ireland to play a more expansive game in the forthcoming Six Nations Championship.

"In the past we would have looked at our strengths; a midfield that would have taken the ball up quite well for us and we weren't that quick on the outside. Now we're looking to have an ability to perhaps play a more all-round game."

Yet, when the team is announced this Tuesday, it's liable to be a bit of the same old, same old out wide, with perhaps two centres on the wings - with only Dennis Hickie emerging as a pacey alternative in the shortterm.

It highlights Gatland's point about a limited playing base, which is always likely to present Ireland with a lack of depth in one or two areas. In six years' time, there'll possibly be a crop of wingers about, and a shortage at hooker or somewhere else.

In maximising the resources available to him, Gatland adds the rider: "Being more expansive doesn't mean the ball has to always go to the wingers. We're just probably looking to keep the ball alive more. That's what we'd ideally like to do, depending on the opposition we're up against, and picking players who are capable of doing that for us."

When it comes to the hoped for progress of this team, Gatland certainly sounds as enthusiastic as before. He says he enjoys the job as much as ever, working with the players, the banter, the media interviews (not).

He doesn't come across as a man who thinks his days as Irish coach are numbered, even if the odds are against his contract being renewed come the end of the season. Essentially, that hinges on the results and performances of the Irish team. They haven't tended to be the strongest bargaining tools, and Gatland's five predecessors will vouch for that.

He says he doesn't read the papers, though clearly he's surprisingly thin-skinned at times. He'd clearly love to extend his tenure, hence his anger at the notion that he was scouting for alternative employment while in New Zealand last month. He is also irked by the perception that there are differences between himself and his new assistant Eddie O'Sullivan.

Gatland, bitten in the past by spelling out his own high expectation, has tempered his forecasts for this year.

England provide the first challenge and their recent form doesn't make them the easiest team to read.

They might have as few as half a dozen of the team which easily beat Ireland last season, and although Gatland can make a good fist of second-guessing Clive Woodward's starting line-up, any analysis has to be countered by a wariness that there could be a change in style.

There's also a wariness that while the English World Cup hangover could linger, they could come out fighting and take out their frustration on Ireland, kickstarting another one of their imposing European campaigns.

"At times they can be brilliant and in terms of putting teams away they can be as ruthless as anybody," says Gatland. "That makes them dangerous if they do get a couple of scores in quick succession. We've got to be really resilient.

"They are a dangerous team at the moment and to counter that we've to be very strong defensively and look to put them under pressure by defending well, and looking to get our game going. In the past, a criticism of us is that we haven't been as effective in getting our own game going quickly enough."

Indeed, for their coach's sake, this is no time for the Irish team to dilly-dally.