Kiwis in another class: Murphy

IF the Irish squad was asked to select a soundtrack for last Saturday’s defeat they would do worse than start off with the Motown classic ‘Nowhere To Run’ by Martha and the Vandellas.

New Zealand’s performance was as much about their unyielding defence as their awesome attacking play.

Ireland may have been operating off less than full steam but Geordan Murphy, Gordon D’Arcy and Shane Horgan all gave enough glimpses to suggest that they were capable of causing defences some problems.

On another day, against another defence, they probably would have. Not here. Every path they ran down four days ago turned out to be a dead end manned by a black wall. As the song goes: ‘Everywhere I go/ Your face I see/ Every step I take/ You take with me, yeah’.

“Playing full-back against them was tough but I think some of our forwards were particularly banged up,” Murphy said in CityWest yesterday.

“They’re a class unit, the best in the world both defensively and offensively. They were a different class. They made it very tough for us. In saying that, we didn’t get a huge amount of ball to play with and, when we did, we made a few mistakes. We gave them back the ball and they’re so comfortable with it that it was a tough day for us.”

As everyone in the Irish camp readily admitted, there were too many times when they made it tougher on themselves. Passes were forced meaning the receiver was plucking ball from behind his ear or having to stretch just to bring it under control.

Such a lack of composure was painted in an even less flattering light by the comfort with which New Zealand flung the ball around, with forwards possessing hands every bit as soft as their back line colleagues.

“I don’t know if lack of composure is the right way to say it,” said Murphy. “It’s difficult when you’re getting scrappy ball and you’re not really set in position. It’s tough to run any sort of phase moves. A few times we did go to multi-phase but you don’t have a full back line together because you’ve got a few backs in the rucks, so we found it quite difficult. All credit to them, they were fantastic.”

The ANZAC onslaught continues apace this week. On the face of it, Ireland’s task is more Alpine than Himalayan with a run of seven straight defeats following Australia around like a bad smell and almost a dozen seasoned internationals sitting out the current tour back home.

Leaving all that aside, the Aussies - while respected and sometimes even feared - have never been gaped at with the same reverential awe as the All Blacks on this island and that has been reflected in the results.

Ireland claimed the Wallaby scalp three years ago on the last occasion they pitched up in Dublin on a dog of a November day and Eddie O’Sullivan’s side should have repeated the dose a year later in the World Cup group match in Melbourne.

Dig deeper, however, and what emerges is an Australian team that, for all its problems, has been just a hair’s breadth off the top teams in the world this season. As Murphy points out, Eddie Jones will see this as the perfect opportunity to get an ever more cumbersome monkey off his back.

“A lot of their defeats have come in the Tri-Nations where they’ve come up against New Zealand and South Africa, two of the best teams in the world. They’ve had two hard weekends of it over here as well in England and France, but we know how hard it can be to play over in those places as well. They’ll really target this as a game they can win and they’ll see us as an end to their losing streak.”

Even the dogs on the street are fully aware of the problems Australia are having up front but their potential to destroy teams with ball in hand is undimmed. Alan Gaffney called their back line the world’s best this week.

“They’re like the Kiwis,” Murphy enthused.

“They’ve got some strength in depth across the board. We’ll see it this weekend, especially us guys in the back line. They’re just class rugby players who can play anywhere. We’ll probably see Matt Rogers at ten. We’ve seen a lot of him at 15 and 13, but he’s come across from rugby league so he can pretty much play anywhere in the back line.

“Lote Tuqiri is the same, Drew Mitchell is the same. Chris Latham too, these are all guys that can pop up anywhere on the rugby field and they’ll cause trouble to any defence.”