Resilience was the key for Ireland in 6 Nations, says Joe Schmidt

Joe Schmidt began celebrating Ireland’s RBS 6 Nations triumph by paying tribute to the resilience of his Ireland players for the way they bounced back from defeat in Wales to deliver a 40-10 thumping of Scotland in Edinburgh.

Ireland had seen their record-equalling run of 10 successive victories come to an end along with their hopes for a Grand Slam in Cardiff nine days ago, the 23-16 defeat turning the championship into a dramatic three-way chase for points on Saturday with the Welsh and England joining Schmidt’s side in the hunt for silverware.

And after Ireland delivered a four-try to one defeat of the Scots at Murrayfield, before watching England come up short by six points in a nerve-wracking thriller against France, the victorious head coach for the second year in a row spoke about the characteristic of which he was most proud in his Paul O’Connell-led squad.

“The resilience they showed,” Schmidt, pictured, replied. “You could see them starting to bounce back on Thursday. I texted the players on Tuesday and just said ‘training wasn’t flash today but get a day’s rest and let’s start from scratch on Thursday and really launch ourselves into this last challenge’. You know when you ask something of them they are going to give it their very best shot.

“Sometimes their best shot, as it was in Cardiff as in that second-half, wasn’t quite enough to get them over the line but it’s funny, we took a fair bit of confidence out of the amount of the game we controlled once we got through that poor 20 minutes at the start. You give Wales a 12-point head start, a Lions packed team, and you get to within four and starting to really put pressure on them, that in its own way gave us a little bit of confidence even though we didn’t get the result.”

Schmidt will not see his players again until May, when he will select an Ireland XV to play the Barbarians at Thomond Park. He will take some time out to be with his family as they seek specialist guidance overseas for his son Luke’s epilepsy, an issue he campaigns about on behalf of the country’s 40,000 sufferers of the condition. The final-day drama though, he admitted, had been emotional as the Ireland camp watched the nerve-wracking finale to the England-France game with the English just coming up short to leave Irish as champions again on points difference.

“For some of the players, you know how difficult the day is going to be and you try not to get ahead of yourself and dream up a whole lot of scenarios where we just manage to scrape through. You have got to pinch yourself a little bit when you end up in the situation that we managed to find ourselves when the French did finally kick that penalty out.”

Schmidt likened it to the rollercoaster of emotions he went through during Leinster’s European final comeback to beat Northampton in Cardiff in 2011.

“You think you’re gone, you’re back in and then you get there. It was a little bit like that, watching that England game.

“Coming into it, I thought: ‘yeah, we’ve set them a pretty tough target but they’re capable’. They go 7-0 up after about four minutes and you go ‘aw, that’s not what we’re looking for’...

“France bounced back and took the lead and we got excited about that and, you know, I don’t want to go through it score-by-score — I didn’t actually see them all thankfully, it would have been close to the death of me.”

Schmidt is aware that expectations for a successful World Cup campaign this autumn will now increase for his world number three-ranked team but having been criticised for their lack of tries earlier in the campaign, the head coach insisted he would not allow his squad to get carried away with themselves as they bid to at least make a first semi-final appearance.

“I think, based on the comments of some people including some of our own people we’re not that much of a threat, but hopefully we can continue to stay a little bit under the radar,” he said.

“I’s going to be an incredibly tough tournament, we’ve never made a semi and everybody knows that that’s where we’ve got to try and get to.

“That’s what we’ll work toward and probably the low-key approach, if we can take that into that challenge it would be great because I think you can get distracted and that’s always a risk.”

FIXTURES AND RESULTS

Round 1: Wales 16 England 21; Italy 3 Ireland 26; France 15 Scotland 8.

Round 2: England 47 Italy 17; Ireland 18 France 11; Scotland 23 Wales 26.

Round 3: Scotland 19 Italy 22; France 13 Wales 20; Ireland 19 England 9.

Round 4: Wales 23 Ireland 16; England 25 Scotland 13; Italy 0 France 29.

Round 5: Italy 20 Wales 61; Scotland 10 Ireland 40; England 55 France 35.