Few positives as red rose get back on track
A comparison between Ronan O’Gara and Jonny Wilkinson to provide the meat of our piece, maybe, with a side dressing of form lines and World Cup prospects, but that was wiped from the menu in the 21st minute of the game, of which more anon.
Perhaps we should have known. Saturday was unusual from the moment this column got on the train. The number of gents sporting the red rose — collected at all points along the track between Charleville and Portlaoise, it seemed — was a surprise, for one thing. Who knew about the sleeper cells of Home Counties rugger fans deep undercover in the midlands? In Dublin there was something that didn’t gel either. Whether that was because of the scattered Donegal cars with accompanying green-and-gold flags, which signalled that time was a little out of joint for a rugby international, or the eye-rolling attempts in the Aviva to generate an atmosphere ... the chap in the middle of the field with the microphone must have been happy when he looked for arms in the air: there was no shortage of hand gestures being made near this spectator.
We may not remember it, events in the game having overtaken previous impressions a little, but England were under pressure before the kick-off. They’d been criticised at home for being primitive in attack while there were a few concerns about the lack of imagination in their midfield above all.
That was more or less a guarantee that their cutting edge would come from the very same zone, and so it proved. Manu Tuilagi recently spent 14 hours getting a tribal tattoo done on his upper arm back home in Samoa; he needed only four minutes to skip through the Irish defence for a try.
On the resumption his centre partner Mike Tindall — nobody’s idea of the incarnation of subtlety — slipped through a well-judged kick which Delan Armitage dotted down, and that was very much that (it was an effort not to affix ‘delicate’ to that description, by the way).
England back on track for World Cup glory. Or respectability, at any rate.
For Ireland, the very worst news came at the end of the first quarter. David Wallace had just done what he does best — powering on with the ball even when it seemed he was bottled up — when he collected the ball again on the right wing, only to be buried by a Tuilagi tackle.
It proceeded then almost in slow motion: Wallace slapping the turf in anguish; the expressions on the faces of the medical team; the arrival of the cart to take him off. For good measure he was joined in the sick bay by Jamie Heaslip, concussed before the break.
Ireland weren’t alone in suffering back row losses yesterday: Kieran Read and Adam Thomson were taken off injured for the All Blacks in their last Tri Nations game against Australia, for instance, and Richie McCaw picked up a back injury, but that’s New Zealand, where international loose forwards fall out of the fruit trees.
Positives? Well, it could have been worse. Tuilagi might have galloped the length of the field for an intercept try but was hauled down by his Leicester clubmate Geordan Murphy. The full-back seems to have had his defending questioned since Éamon de Valera was President, so it was a good moment for him.
Paul O’Connell was busy all through, while O’Gara’s matador impression in the corner on 25 minutes was a rare moment of cheer for supporters in green. After that you were scratching your head.
There are all sorts of contexts you could drag up — England were humiliated the last time they came to the Aviva, so they had a touch more incentive to go out and hammer into their opponents: that was clear from Courtney Lawes’ early body-check on Murphy (though at least that made it necessary for English journalists to use a different expression about Lawes than the customary ‘unlimited potential’).
There is also the matter of the welcome awaiting England and Ireland: quite a few latecomers to press box and stand alike arrived drooling after Australia’s 25-20 win over New Zealand, played earlier on Saturday, the game in which so many All Black forwards were injured.
The consensus was that the standard looked far ahead of what was on offer in the Aviva.
Be that as it may, the men with the red rose on the train home last Saturday night were more optimistic than their counterparts in green.
* Contact: michael.moynihan@examiner.ie Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx
