Eddie has a lot to ponder for Paris

WITH Gordon D’Arcy ruled out for the rest of the Six Nations campaign with a broken arm and his team seriously under-performing, Eddie O’Sullivan desperately needs some good news ahead of the visit to the Stade de France on Saturday.

The fact that Paul O’Connell trained with the squad last week suggested that the talismanic second-row forward was on the way back. But O’Sullivan admitted yesterday that it would be the Scotland match on February 23 at the earliest before he could be considered for a return to international action.

“I’m careful with Paul because he made good progress for a month in the lead-up to our first camp but he got up one morning and his back had gone backwards again, if you forgive the pun,” said the coach. “He had gone back a few weeks and was in big trouble. It’s one of those injuries that can be going great today and suddenly can act up again. It’s a disc problem.

“But he’s making good progress and the plan is for him to play maybe half a game with Munster A against Ulster A next week. The following week there’s a Celtic League game and if he gets through that, he’ll put himself in the frame for the Scotland game. That’s the plan.”

Inevitably, there is now keen speculation as to the team O’Sullivan will announce tomorrow for the visit to Paris. With D’Arcy out of the equation and the three-quarter line failing to click, he has a lot of thinking to do.

“Playing Andrew Trimble in midfield is one of the options,” he said. “Shane Horgan played on Friday so he also comes into the mix. That’s the main conundrum, getting a balance with Gordon gone. We got a bit of a battering up front on Friday, but I thought Shane did well.

“He needed a game at that level to get back to where he was and it will have benefited him. You have to factor in his experience and ability on the big day. Tommy Bowe had a fine game against the Saxons. He lost out narrowly in the selection of Saturday’s 22 to Rob Kearney, and I thought Rob did well for us yesterday. It was a tough call between Tommy and Rob when we named the 22.”

O’Sullivan had slept on what he had seen at Croke Park on Saturday but didn’t see any reason to change the views yesterday.

“We made some good line breaks, particularly in the first half, we should have scored more tries,” he said. “The game slowed up then in terms of quality of ruck ball at the breakdown. We got the wrong side of the ref and had a battle for the rest of the day. It was along the lines of two years ago at Lansdowne Road.

“We wanted to get a win under our belts. You want to hit the ground running at the start of the championship, but you have to be sensible and that doesn’t always happen. Even last year in Cardiff, we left with a win but we weren’t happy. If the opportunities in the first half had stuck, it would have been a much easier day out for us.”

While I and most observers would have thought that a home game against Italy would be the ideal way to start the Six Nations, O’Sullivan refuses to see things in that light.

“Italy come out and try to throw the kitchen sink at you,” he maintained. “Last year, they beat Scotland up in Murrayfield. It was about getting the result. It would have been nicer to win by more points, it would have been nicer to finish what we created in the first half and early in the second half, but we weren’t accurate enough.”

O’Sullivan also claimed to be unaware that the game was almost completely devoid of atmosphere.

“We’re in a coach’s box and you can’t hear a lot,” he said. “You’re watching the game so you tend not to pay much attention to it. I expect it went quiet a couple of times because the tempo of the game dropped when they dominated possession or slowed up ours. We were trying to create go-forward ball, but there were phases of the game that were going nowhere.

“But I thought there was a lot of good stuff. We had a lot of line breaks, we scrummaged very well. Our line-out execution was poor at times and we need to improve on that. The performance was not what we saw in Rome last year but I was happy enough with what I saw.

“We had less possession than Italy yesterday, they shaded possession 52% to 48%, so we had a lot of tackling to do. The players were saying the pace and intensity of the Six Nations is a notch up from what they’re used to. To get that game under your belt is important, you try to build on that, because next week’s game is tougher again.”