Hard test needed but not that hard

Players' reaction to Ireland-Bayonne match: Gerry Thornleyon the bruises and brickbats after a brutal battle that could have been even more costly for Ireland

Hindsight being 20-20 vision, there'll be plenty of people out there now saying Thursday's belatedly arranged warm-up game against Bayonne was an accident waiting to happen, that some home players couldn't resist the opportunity to make their mark against one of France's main World Cup pool rivals. They were perhaps proved right.

Then again, as both last Saturday's defeat in Murrayfield and Thursday night's display highlighted, most of the Irish World Cup squad, especially the frontliners, desperately need match time. One can only wrap players in cotton wool so much, and for example, if France v England going toe to toe over successive Saturdays doesn't contain an element of risk, no games do.

Thankfully, the wounds sustained and inflicted on a raucous and fractious night in the Stade Jean Dauger in Basque country on Thursday night will ebb away long before the embittered memories of what should have been a carnival occasion.

Even so, it was a surprise that Bayonne players so blatantly engaged in off-the-ball incidents and square-ups in front of an English referee, dignitaries from both the IRFU and the French Rugby Federation (FFR), not to mention a 15,000 crowd; although perhaps in such a proud rugby region, for which Bayonne are a greater source of Basque identity than Biarritz, that merely added to the potency of the brew on the night.

By rights certain Bayonne players and the club collectively should be punished, though they probably won't be, and this particularly applies to Mikaera Tewhata, the Kiwi lock who punched Brian O'Driscoll and wasn't even yellow carded for it, even though four of his team-mates were at other junctures of the match for foul play.

The ball having been cleared away from a defensive Bayonne scrum, and a relieving kick having been charged down over the dead ball line, O'Driscoll had seemingly acted as peacemaker when the rival props, Aretz and Marcus Horan, stood up grappling in one of the night's countless off-the-ball scuffles. Whereupon O'Driscoll was struck by Tewhata with a punch he couldn't have seen coming.

"Brian wasn't even the guy he was looking at which is really cowardly you know," observed Ireland's three-try scorer Denis Hickie afterwards, and at the time Paul O'Connell could be seen remonstrating with the officials and angrily pointing toward Tewhata.

The home town reaction left as bad a taste in the mouth. Jean-Pierre Ellisalde, the one-time French scrumhalf who is now head coach of Bayonne, defended his replacement lock and maintained it was "a very small punch, that kind of punch I've seen 2,000 times in my life. I wonder what O'Driscoll was doing in a scrum 20 days before the World Cup?"

The Irish players were not shrinking violets. Neil Best seemingly only knows one way of playing, and unsurprisingly he was quick to react and become entangled in running feuds; earning himself a yellow card, as did Gordon D'Arcy, of all people, for a punch. Alan Quinlan might have followed and a picture in L'Equipe, under the heading "Tout sauf amical" (everything but friendly) doesn't do Simon Easterby any favours.

It would have been impossible not to react in the circumstances, although the Irish players' frustration was all the more acute in the knowledge that any disciplinary punishment would have been more far more costly for them than the home side.

So what did the Ireland players gain from the exercise? "Not a whole lot, I'll be honest with you," was Donncha O'Callaghan's assessment. "You leave the pitch with regrets and you wonder when you get inside is anything like that worth it? What's the point in playing a fixture like this? Could we have played ourselves or played a provincial team and not had as many cheap shots?

"There's no comeback from it. There's no point in playing a game like this. If we throw a punch, get a red card and miss the World Cup, they throw punches and it's nothing to them. They're heroes around the place. It's just cheap and I think it kills off what makes rugby great, the way amateurs and professionals can mix, and I think it's disappointing to see what happened tonight.

"Before, I never got to play in these games much, you could go out and play them in the spirit of the game, but this is madness," he declared. "It was across the board and Neil Best took unbelievable punishment all night; cheap shots, hit late, hit from behind, grabbing him, gouging him, everything. For a fella who put up with as much as he put up with before he actually snapped; I've so much respect for him."

On the face of it, Ireland still look a long way short of the level attained by France in Twickenham last Saturday or, no doubt, what will be asked of them by a more full-strength English selection today.

"It was good to get a run-out but it never got up to international pace," admitted O'Callaghan. "It felt like we played brilliantly in the first 20 minutes of each half but then we kind of got drawn into stupid off-the-ball incidents. It's hard to tell fellas 'let if off, let it off' when they're picking up all these hits and knocks and bangs, but when that happened Brian I think fellas just saw red. Then we brought guys off the bench to protect some guys but it was hard to keep the head when it was just blatant cheap shots.

"We wanted to kind of break stride, maybe into second or third gear," O'Callaghan added. "We did that in phases, mainly at the start of each half, but we're still a long way off. But it's a long way to the World Cup as well, We want to be peaking come then. Say last week, people probably would have said we didn't have enough contact; we're a week further down and hopefully come the World Cup we'll hit the ground running."

"It was a bruising game all right, a bit like a step back in time," was Hickie's apt description of a night which reinforces the popular image of French club rugby. "I thought those things were a thing of the past.

"We got a few things out of it, guys getting a run-out after a while, and it's 80 minutes under our belt. The positive is we got a run-out; a game this week and another one next week. The more games the better but the less games like that the better too," he said wryly.

"We've a lot to lose playing against guys who have nothing to lose so there was an element of danger in a game like that. I thought we handled ourselves quite well. There's always a risk in any match, and the nearer the World Cup the more the risks. You just want the World Cup to start but you still need games so you're stuck between a rock and a hard place."

Hickie's razor-sharp hat-trick of tries again called into question his decision earlier in the week to retire after the World Cup. At 31, he looks as good as ever, but like Eric Miller two seasons ago, perhaps his decision will enable him to play with even more freedom and to squeeze every last drop out of what remains of his career.

"Personally it was a strange kind of week but I'm very content now and it just makes me all the more focused on this World Cup. I'm hungrier than ever now to play as well as I can. The clock is ticking and I hope every game I play is my best one."

D'Arcy and Denis Leamy also looked particularly sharp, Peter Stringer's passing picked up where it left off at the end of last March; Leamy and Horan were up for it, getting their hands on the ball, and O'Connell's match sharpness definitely came up a notch.

As intriguing as any of the individual performances was Best's. Pressed into an unfamiliar openside role pending David Wallace's hoped for recovery from his troublesome ankle problem, it was hard to make a definitive judgment but he looked better equipped for the role than Stephen Ferris, who has worn the number seven jersey more regularly for Ulster.

Early on, Best was the first forward to the opposite wing in keeping a move alive off Hickie and ensuring the continuity from which O'Connell scored. He also made a couple of typically fearless poaches on the ground.

As for the set-pieces, there was the embarrassment of one penalty on their own put-in against a seven-man Bayonne pack when the frontrows stood up, but that could perhaps be attributed to naive refereeing, and there was a crooked throw, while again, they surprisingly didn't make many inroads into the Bayonne line. When they ran straighter and harder, and cleared out quickly, the tries were there for the picking but there was a lack of precision in the red zone, when they forced the pass and became a little too loose, and as O'Sullivan also conceded, they began to play too laterally.

All in all though, definitely a worthwhile run-out, albeit only just. Phew.