Kidney puts stress on the positives

By Charlie Mulqueen

Monday, February 08, 2010

LIKE all good managers and coaches, Declan Kidney will never criticise his players in public.

It was the same after Saturday’s disappointing performance, when he sought the positives and found ways of excusing the negatives.

Privately, though, he must have been fuming at much of what he saw from a team light years ahead of the Italians, even shading them in the scrums, where some expected them to take a pounding. The nearest he came to expressing his frustration was: "Everywhere is where we need to improve."

Ireland were never going to lose. Neither, though, were they ever really able to stamp their authority on proceedings. They handed Italy a try on a plate and had it not been for a similar gift presented by a daft lineout throw by their captain and hooker Leonardo Ghiraldini, the Irish might well have been restricted to the earlier beauty touched down by Jamie Heaslip.

It helped, too, that Ronan O’Gara sent six out of six between the posts and became the first player to pass the 500 points mark in the Six Nations. It was little wonder that Kidney paid him a well-merited compliment.

"Isn’t it great?" he glowed. "We’ll need Rog doing that, we’ll need Jonathan (Sexton) doing that. An out-half is going to make more inches in the papers but, thankfully, that was also going on today at positions one and two and we had a few younger fellas coming through in the back-row.

"Kevin McLaughlin didn’t do too badly instead of Stephen Ferris and you had Paddy Wallace and Gordon D’Arcy going at it at 12 and Luke Fitzgerald and Geordan Murphy coming back to us. Getting a win without many of the fellas who weren’t available to us isn’t a bad place to be."

Kidney placed a deal of significance on the break over Christmas and new year, claiming the benefits will come in five or six weeks.

"You can’t flog a dead horse," was how he attributed the way they prevented Mirco Bergamasco’s brilliant line break in the last play of the game down from resulting in a try to the freshness which enabled the players to scramble and recover. Kidney, also, stressed that they weren’t getting carried away with the performance.

"We need to get our support play better," he said. "We’ll have to take a look at how we can strike off the set piece. Defensively, I thought we held up, our kick-chase game needs to improve and our counter attack.

"We need more cohesiveness between players and that’s the downside of not running together at Christmas."

Considering Ireland snaffled 50% of the Italian line-out throws and at least held their own at scrum and ruck time, Kidney had to be disappointed at his side’s failure to score more, particularly in the second half.

"You’d be disappointed we didn’t score more tries and I wouldn’t be delirious about the performance but I’m not going to knock it either," he commented. In the first half, I thought we attacked very well down the left wing but the pass went into touch. In the second, Gordon [D’Arcy] was through and we turned over that ball. If we can convert that one more score next week on top of what we did, we’ll need to do all of that and hopefully the defence will be as good though I think France will play a different game and that will present its own challenges."

Reflecting on Ireland’s last four games in Paris, Kidney said: "In cricket terms, we should bat first without giving them the ball. I don’t know what ‘Allez, Allez’ means but if the French get into that mode next Saturday we’ll be chasing them around so we’ll need to have the ball. I’d say we lost the field possession stakes on Saturday and if we end up like that against the French, we won’t win."

This story appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, February 08, 2010