Ronan O'Gara: Joey Carbery return has us licking our lips but referees have me biting mine
Nothing speaks to the anxiety over Ireland’s issues at number 10 than the excitement over a somewhat academic conversion in Cardiff last Friday night.
But in nominating Joey Carbery’s touchline add-on as my moment of the weekend — we lost at home to Toulouse, give me a break — I’ve also got to get a grip and ask why.
Reaction to Ireland’s win in Rome was revealing. People took comfort that Johnny Sexton was back in the pivot and played eighty. For all the reasons there is significance in the now for Andy Farrell and Ireland, one has to keep constantly under consideration who will steer the ship in two years’ time.
England look mentally fatigued. The hangover from the 2019 World Cup final has kicked in and there isn’t the stimulus of a coaching change in the meantime. Are they bothered? So long as the shelf-life of Eddie Jones isn’t compromised, their graph will be going in the right direction by 2023. England and France operate to a different biorhythm to Scotland and Ireland between World Cups. We both live in the short term.
Back to Carbery. Of course, there was undue excitement at that conversion for Munster in the 20-11 win over the Blues. What we have already determined is that Carbery has it. Johnny isn’t realistically going to be a starting 10 in two years’ time and there is comfort in scanning the horizon and seeing Joey back in our eyeline. When you have what he has, people get excited. His quality isn’t up for debate — which is the issue for every other candidate for the No 10 jersey for Ireland.
He has made us lick our lips.
Any chance he gets into a training camp for the final game against England? To get that buzz going internally for him before the summer, if they are going touring. To surround himself again with test-level players?
Seductive, but unlikely.
The approach to his return-to-play will be understandably cautious. But he had to have a restart point and that was at Cardiff Arms Park. He has already come a distance from an ankle that was beyond butchered. If we had moved that conversion infield by 15 metres and he’d hooked it horribly left, we’d give him a pass and cite rustiness, that he was grossly short of match practice.
So the feeling of ‘good on ya lad’, while premature, was wholly understandable. It wasn’t a test match, it wasn’t Six Nations, it wasn’t even La Rochelle, but I found myself bouncing up off the sofa. We could do with a few more such moments in our lives.
It also salvaged this column from descending into a rant on referees. I’ve said more than once, it’s an area I am working hard on. If referee angst is consuming all your energy as a coach, then you obviously have your own team sorted, and I don’t have mine anywhere near sorted.
As a player in the heat of battle, things are very charged. Your heart rate is out of control. You are clinging onto some form of equilibrium, but you accept it’s not under lock and key.
Theoretically, there should not be the same scope for getting side-tracked as a coach. It’s a crutch you try hard not to rely on.
Communication between referee and player must, must be a two-way street and some officials certainly don’t help themselves in that regard. The referee isn’t bigger than the game and some are threatening to be. Had Pascal Gauzere not been so dismissive of Owen Farrell’s queries Saturday in relation to the first Wales try, there might have been greater empathy for him when he was admitting to a pair of errors come Monday.
That all said, England should look at themselves and their response to that penalty call. What is the right winger, Anthony Watson doing? Why is he involving himself in a ‘huddle’ under the posts when the crossfield kick is something that should always be on his watch? It’s actually George Ford who ends up closest to making the tackle on scorer Josh Adams.
Secondly, Dan Biggar’s kick was nowhere as effective as it could have been in terms of the trajectory. It spent three seconds longer in the air than it needed to which further damns England’s response in the moment. I know 10s who’d deliver that crossfield and afford the try scorer time to change into a dickie bow for dinner...
When a referee tells a captain to have a word with his players, there’s a time and a place and it never involves turning your back on a potentially live situation. Farrell had a point, but it should have waited until Biggar had pointed to the sticks or had found touch.
The interesting thing is that for a bit afterwards, England played their best stuff but once level at 24-24, they — and Itoje in particular — became quite ragged. However, in attributing the defeat to that, a lot of pundits have fallen into the lazy thinking of overlooking Wales. Or worse still, adding Gauzere to the collection of charms the Welsh have accumulated in this year’s championship.
Uninspiring against Ireland and falling over the line on the back of Peter O’Mahony’s dismissal. Outplayed against Scotland and thrown a lifeline by Zander Ferguson’s red card. Is it all that straightforward? How have we come from talk of the sack to talk of a Slam for Wayne Pivac?
A squad under the most serious stress has shown exemplary discipline — unlike their opponents in all three matches to date — which speaks volumes for a happy camp.
Forty points against England, how is that ‘haunted’? Pivac introducing Callum Sheehy for Biggar on 45 minutes and bringing further impact in the shape of Willis Halaholo for Lion, Jonathan Davies, five minutes later. That’s not haunted, that’s ballsy. They ran England around the park. Wales are not being given enough credit.
France go to Twickenham next week and entertain Wales a week after. The Covid outbreak in Galthie’s group has halted momentum and the intrigue now lies in whether they can pick it up again for two difficult games.
The coach’s controversy is another distraction: He left the bubble but had a mask on when he went to watch his young lad’s game. Isn’t that what fathers do? It’s also right that France hasn’t had to forfeit the Scotland game, which will now be played on Friday March 26. It would have made a mockery of the tournament.
Both Uini Antonio and Brice Dulin contracted the virus, and La Rochelle’s other two French squad members are only out of quarantine today, so are not considered for tomorrow’s important game in Castres. This would have been a dogfight whether we were coming off the back of a first home loss in two years or not.
Every team has the right to lose once, but good teams respond.
Lesson for the week: Inferior discipline makes it very hard to overcome an opponent.
