Wallace says it’s not mission impossible
A chronic ankle injury, however, has impaired his contribution and there have been few of those trademark bursts which Ireland badly need against Argentina at Parc des Prince on Sunday.
Mused Wallace: “I don’t think the ankle has been an issue, rather it’s been more the lack of match practice and training that have hindered me.”
“I worked hard mentally and doing analysis on trying to be fully right even though I wasn’t doing the rugby training on the park.
“The injury is more or less where I want it to be now. I have three games under my belt and hopefully the pre-season cobwebs are all gone.
“I’m not even thinking about that at this stage because you have to be so single minded in your attitude going into this weekend’s game.
“All I’m thinking about is doing everything right and I won’t be worrying about anything else.
“I’ve been involved in what were supposed to be impossible situations before and yet we pulled it off. The first thing is not to panic because a lot of those tries with Munster came late on. And we saw that too with Argentina when they scored very late to get their bonus point against Georgia.
“Basically, you go toe-to-toe for the whole game and wear a team down before you can get the tries and that’s something we must bring to the game Sunday. It’s very much do-or-die but we’ve all been saying that first of all we have to go out and win the game.”
Two seasons ago, Ireland put in probably their worst 40 minutes in living memory against France, turning around an incredible 43-3 behind only to run in 28 unanswered points on the turnover. That’s the kind of scoring rate they need against the Pumas to have any chance of staying in the World Cup, a point with which Wallace is in full agreement.
“The way we played in that second half, to an extent, is the way we need to play this game except that we need to put in the hard graft first and make the hard yards before the game opens up,” he says.
“If we play like that from the very start, we’re going to come asunder. I don’t know what their back-row will be but it doesn’t really matter because they’re all very impressive. They’re obviously very physical, great on the ground and disrupt a lot of ball. They’ve all been firing very well and it’s going to be very tough.”
His big regret about the French game is the number of penalties which gave the opposition “a huge cushion points wise to sit on and that’s something you can’t do against a French team in Paris. They were able to sit back and play some rugby after that and that’s where we didn’t want to be.”
And so to Sunday and the near certainty of the abrupt termination of Ireland’s involvement in the World Cup after the preliminary rounds. Can that somehow be avoided? “If we can get our defence right and go out with the correct attitude and also cut out the silly mistakes and the discipline errors, we’re certainly on the right road,” declared Wallace.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
