O’Driscoll: we must reach targets we set ourselves

BRIAN O’DRISCOLL equals an Irish record of which he had little knowledge when he leads his country in Saturday’s World Cup game against Georgia in the Stade Chaban Delmas.

It will be his 11th appearance in the World Cup which ties the previous mark set by another Blackrock centre, Brendan Mullin. Asked if such an achievement stirred his blood, we saw the first smile from the skipper since Sunday’s debacle against Namibia when he quipped: “It’s just the motivation I need.”

However, it was quickly back to business for Ireland’s star man who was possibly more upset than anyone by the 39 turnovers conceded against the Namibians and the general disastrously poor quality of the team’s performance. As skipper and thetalisman of the side, he recognises the major role he has to adopt in restoring morale and self belief into a shell shocked panel of rugby players.

“I choose my moment to say something when they’re most relevant,’’ he commented. “We studied the video yesterday and tried to put the Namibian game to bed. We realised where we were going wrong and will try to put that right by Saturday.”

There is a general sense of foreboding here in the south west of France that another performance like Sunday’s could have a shattering effect on the squad’s morale. Ronan O’Gara was probably speaking in the heat of the moment and in the immediate aftermath of such a poor performance when stating: “It’s not enjoyable at the minute. It’s the dark side of professional sport. I don’t enjoy that and I don’t think the other players do either,” but it is an indication of the tension that could escalate with another poor display.

O’Driscoll made little of any such likelihood, pointing out that “we’ve played only one game. It would betaking those words out of context to say everybody is of the same opinion. People are enjoying the training, they want to get their rugby right. We had a bad first performance and we now have an opportunity to get back to the way we know we are capable of playing. It’s early days to be complaining of things like that.”

The captain insists he wasn’t aware of complacency creeping into the team last week. He believes if there had been anything of that nature, it would have been dispelled by another horror display against Italy in the warm-up game in Belfast.

“Looking back on the video, a lot of our ideas were good but our execution was just terrible,’’ he stressed. “There were so many unforced errors. I was trying to think it through, everyone, maybe bar Girvan (Dempsey), made a couple of errors. That’s 28 straight away. If you can cut that in half or cut it in a big way, you’re a long way to playing an awful lot better and bringing teams through phases. That’s where the scores come and the line breaks come and the penalties come so we’ve just got to play a bit of a patient game.

“Anxiousness crept in towards the end when we realised things weren’t going well for us. People did tighten up a bit. It’s hard to put your finger on that, perhaps it’s individual responsibility. I spoke to the lads about there being really thin margins between things coming off and going very poorly. Hopefully, from now on the 50-50s will stick a little more and that will enable us to create the foundations for our game.”

The reaction of the thousands of Irish fans in Bordeaux on Sunday bordered on anger. They had paid good money and taken time off work to be there only to see their side perform like novices.

“We have standards for ourselves and know if we dip below them, the knock on effect is that the general public will be unimpressed by the way we play,” he declared. “But we can’t concern ourselves about the public. It’s about us and making sure we reach the targets we have set ourselves.

“Any time we don’t do that, we are disappointed.”