Kidney looks forward in bid to regain balance

As Ireland chaotically lurched from one end of the Yarrow Stadium to the other on Saturday night there wasn’t a whole lot of it on show.

Nor when Jamie Heaslip effectively ended the game as a contest with his inexplicable, spontaneous combustion was there much balance of the mental variety in a green shirt.

But in trying to plot a way past one of the most galling nights in the recent history of Irish rugby that’s exactly what Declan Kidney is seeking. Denial is never on the agenda for the Ireland coach and, after watching the blood-thirsty All Blacks maul his side in record-breaking fashion in New Plymouth, he faced up to the task at hand.

“We’ve had highs before, how do you come down from highs? In the same way you pick yourself up from lows – you try and keep a balance in life,” said Kidney. “You see what you did well, you see what you did poorly, you rectify the poor bits and you keep trying to do the positives.”

Positives? The performances of Andrew Trimble, Dan Tuohy and Tony Buckley, while there was also something to be taken from the second-half resurgence.

Scoring four tries against the All Blacks had never been done before though and the backline play at times was impressive in the circumstances.

Although, as Donncha O’Callaghan put it afterwards, the All Blacks had already “pulled up the hand brake”.

Negatives? How long do we have? Top of the list, in flashing neon lights, is Heaslip’s ‘brain explosion’, as Graham Henry described it. It was a moment so out of character from a man described in the match programme as ‘the next Ireland captain’.

There were so many more though. A host of individual performances fell short. Cian Healy looked dreadfully out of sorts, Rob Kearney too. The half backs shared some of the night’s most glaring errors and with the Maori lying in wait for a showdown in just four days and the Wallabies approaching over the horizon, somehow saving the tour is Kidney’s task.

“Every day you coach your country is your biggest challenge,” he said. “It’s another challenge. You never want to have days like today. You want to get going again. It’s the only thing to do. Nobody ever said this tour was going to be easy, we haven’t tried to come up with any excuses – there’s a plethora of them there if you want but I think we’d be letting ourselves down if we did that.

“We have a big challenge. Everyone knows playing the Maori is the next thing to a Test match. Defeat is forever. We have to use this loss for positive motivation in the future that it doesn’t ever happen again. We will take a look at how it did happen, we’ll work to rectify that, winning the next match would always be a good trick.”

If they are to upset the odds and do just that, then the next three days of training here in Rotorua will be crucial. There is much to be put right.

Ireland’s Grand Slam triumph of little over a year ago was built upon an iron wall defensive effort that earned Les Kiss a mountain of admirers in the process. In that campaign, the Irish fortress was breached on just three occasions.

On Saturday night, they shipped nine tries, the All Blacks crossing the whitewash with utter abandon. The statistical analysis won’t have made for happy reading for Kiss with Ireland racking up an astonishing 23 missed tackles of a total of 103. Almost one in every four tackles was missed by men in green.

In marked contrast the All Blacks missed just 12 of their 128 tackles. But Kidney refused to pinpoint the sky high number as the reason for the landslide defeat.

“No, that’s putting it all on defence. We knocked the ball on for two or three of the tries, they are not missed tackles, we had a few missed touches, they are not missed tackles so you need to balance it off.

‘You are going to miss tackles in rugby if you don’t hunt as a group, and that’s where the missed tackles came from, the individuality of our defensive effort. That sometimes isn’t a lack of effort, it’s sometimes maybe a bit of a panic, particularly when you’re down a man, (you think) “I must make a big hit”. The big hits didn’t stick.”

They weren’t the only thing that didn’t stick. Ireland had 16 unforced errors, nine of them handling mistakes. Just another lop-sided statistic from a night without balance.

NEW ZEALAND: I Dagg; C Jane, C Smith, B Stanley, J Rokocoko; D Carter, J Cowan; B Franks, K Mealamu, O Franks, B Thorn, A Boric, J Kaino, R McCaw (capt), K Read.

Replacements: Guildford for Jane (63), Cruden for Carter (54), Weepu for Cowan (41), Tialata for B. Franks (52), de Malmanche for Mealamu (63), Whitelock for Thorn (50), Vito for Kaino (38).

Scorers: Tries: Smith (2), Read, Franks, Cowan (2), Whitelock (2), Tialata; Cons: Carter (7) Weepu (2) Pens: Carter.

IRELAND: R Kearney; T Bowe, B O’Driscoll (capt), G D’Arcy, A Trimble; R O’Gara, T O’Leary; C Healy, S Cronin, T Buckley, D O’Callaghan, M O’Driscoll, J Muldoon, D Wallace, J Heaslip.

Replacements: G. Murphy for Kearney (70), Sexton for O’Gara (70), Reddan for O’Leary (70), Court for Healy (77), Fogarty for Cronin (77), Tuohy for M. O’Driscoll (35), Jennings for Muldoon (32).

Scorers: Tries: Tuohy, B O’Driscoll, Bowe, D’Arcy Cons: O’Gara (3), Sexton.

Sin bin: O’Gara (24) Sent off: Heaslip (15).

Referee: Wayne Barnes (Eng).