...not by his reckoning

EDDIE O’SULLIVAN yesterday strenuously defended his position as Irish rugby coach and insisted he had no intention of resigning after the defeat by Wales at Croke Park on Saturday.

The position, of course, could be taken out of his hands should the IRFU decide that enough is enough after another disappointing Irish performance.

O’Sullivan has been in the job since 2002 and prior to that was backs coach for two years under Warren Gatland. Three Triple Crowns in four years prompted the Union to extend his contract by four years but a disastrous World Cup has now been followed by a poor RBS Six Nations Championship.

“That (speculation) is understandable, in this business it seems that you’re one loss away from being under pressure for your job”, he commented yesterday. “That’s the way it seems to work. I suppose it’s easy to sit on one side of a laptop and look for somebody’s head on a plate but I’ve been there before. All you can do is keep working on. It is a game of results, and when you don’t get results that question comes up. From my perspective, I would always do the same thing: get on with the job.”

Pressed on whether there was any danger of losing the dressing-room, O’Sullivan insisted: “I still have the confidence of the players. I don’t have any doubt about that. That’s not an issue from where I am.”

O’Sullivan also stonewalled questions about the tactical approach on Saturday.

“The performance was based on trying to beat Wales”, he argued. “We didn’t want a game that opened up into an end to end, touchline to touchline game. That’s exactly what Wales wanted. We played a very direct game with them. After 20 minutes, I was pretty happy with it. We had them pinned back in the corners, we went very hard at them around the fringes and put ourselves in a good position.

“We were 6-0 up and had Shane’s (Horgan) try been awarded, it would have put us in a great position.

“For all the opportunities Wales had, they didn’t do anything with it. If we were so bad and they were so good, why was there one point in it with five minutes on the clock?

“It mightn’t have been pretty, it mightn’t have been attractive and maybe that’s what people are mixing up. We’ve often gone out and played games where we’ve thrown the ball around. We rolled up our sleeves and went at it up front. I wouldn’t buy into that we did anything wrong with the game plan.”

However there’s no doubt now that Irish rugby is in a state of transition and how best to handle it is a question taxing the minds of the IRFU and O’Sullivan himself. They recently had discussions on the subject along with the provincial coaches.

“I’ve always been told by the Union that the Six Nations is not for messing around”, O’Sullivan. “You just go out and try to win every game as best you can because it’s our pivotal tournament. There is pressure when the southern hemisphere teams come up in the autumn to put out our best team against them because if you downgrade those fixtures, the southern hemisphere teams are not happy coming all the way around the globe and you put out a half-baked side.

“The opposite is true as well. Can you imagine putting a load of young fellas on a plane to New Zealand at the end of May like lambs to the slaughter? There aren’t many windows of opportunity for blooding players.”

Those clamouring for change and lots of it can forget about an experimental side going out against England at Twickenham on Saturday.

“You don’t completely change your game plan based on winning or losing one game”, O’Sullivan maintained. “No one has ever come to me and said ‘see how things go and if you want to throw a few young fellas in at Twickenham, don’t be afraid of it’. You can go that road, but that’s not where the IRFU see it.”

Meanwhile, Brian O’Driscoll will have a scan on his torn hamstring this afternoon. The early prognosis is that he will be out of the game for six to eight weeks.