Eddie: I don’t blame the referee

EDDIE O’SULLIVAN’S body language told its own story after yesterday’s defeat by France.

The upset was etched on his pale face and if Paul O’Connell — sitting beside him — was of a rosier hue after all his exertions on the pitch, he was also struggling to hide the feeling of disenchantment that must have been close to all-consuming.

To their credit, though, they weren’t looking for scapegoats or making an excuse out of the absence of Brian O’Driscoll and Peter Stringer or even the distinctly uneven performance of referee Steve Walsh.

“As soon as the late penalty went over, we spoke about doing the things we needed to do to secure possession from the drop off,” lamented O’Connell. “I didn’t do that, we didn’t do that, the bounce of the ball went their way and that’s what decided the match. Steve went for the whistle just before the Geordan intercept happened and that’s bad luck. Subsequently, I asked him about the advantage and he was wary of that and was trying to play advantage for us and maybe we should have taken our points.”

O’Connell was referring to the crucial moment on 70 minutes when Walsh signalled for an Irish penalty relatively close to the French posts. But they persisted with the attack and the referee eventually declared the advantage to be over.

As for O’Sullivan, he reflected on his team’s very slow start and perhaps it was then rather than at the death Ireland lost this match.

“We didn’t get our hands on the football a lot, France dictated the pace of the game and we lost our first couple of set pieces,” he said. “We were trying to contain them for the first 20 minutes, but once we got our hands on the ball and went at them, we played ourselves back into the game. At half-time, I was happy to be two points down and I felt we had got a handle on things.

“After that, we held on to the ball a lot better, took them on, mixed it up between moving it wide and punching around the sides and mauling them and making them work hard. It was always going to be nip and tuck. We were a bit unlucky a few times when we got breaks, Geordan was one, Marcus was one. If we had got a try at that point, it might have sealed the game.

“We had the French where we wanted them. We controlled the game a lot better and they weren’t happy with the way things were going. They needed a lucky break at the death and it couldn’t have come at a worse time because there was no time to come back. We were dead in the water.”

O’Sullivan added: “But we still showed a lot of composure. The last score we got came from a line-out in our own half and put a fantastic maul together. We were ahead and the pressure was on and they couldn’t afford to give away a penalty for field position. Eventually, we got them to give away a penalty and Rog nailed it. But the ball broke the wrong way at the restart, they hit it on the run and that was it.”

O’Sullivan was sporting enough not to blame Steve Walsh.

“To be fair to him, he said sorry to the boys when he blew the whistle on Geordan’s incident,” he commented. “A French player knocked it on, another picked it up and he automatically assumed the advantage was over. Then a Frenchman threw an intercept pass. That’s the luck of the draw and it could happen to any referee. As for the Marcus incident, you could call it any way but we had Simon (Easterby) in a similar situation last week and it went our way. I thought Steve had a good game, he called it down the middle and refereed consistently at the breakdown. I don’t think he influenced the outcome.”

Not too many people would agree with on that point.

On the question of mistakes his side made, O’Sullivan pointed out “no team plays perfectly for 80 minutes”. “France had a purple patch at the start but then they made a lot of mistakes as the game went on. When you lose a game by one score, you can scroll back through the tape and pick out 10, 15 mistakes and think if we didn’t make those mistakes, we might have won. But that’s a pointless exercise. It’s a challenge to pick ourselves up for what is still to come but there’s a Triple Crown and possibly a championship still to come. We won five games last year and lost the title on points.”