Kidney wants more quality time with players

HOWEVER deserved the rest Declan Kidney is getting this week after a gruelling month steering Ireland through a four-match autumn series, the national team head coach would much rather be out on the training ground preparing for a fifth.

As Kidney sees it, his players are just getting started after four outings over consecutive weekends. Inexperienced players have been given valuable game time, teething problems have been exposed and areas for improvement, several of them, identified.

Defeats to South Africa and New Zealand, but particularly to the Springboks, stick in his craw but the win over Samoa snapped a seven-game losing streak and the defeat of old foes Argentina sent the Ireland squad and fans alike into the winter snow with optimism.

“We lost two, that’s the bit that we’ll take a good look at,” Kidney reflected after Sunday’s 29-9 victory over the Pumas. “We wouldn’t be happy with that.

“Looking back, the first 40 minutes against South Africa put us under a lot of pressure to try and win that one. Had we got a win we could have relaxed things a little bit more. Because we wanted to return to winning ways, we could have stuck with the same team but we wanted to build a squad so much, we made 11 changes. All those 11 fellas showed up very well against Samoa, so there was a benefit in that while the more often we play New Zealand, the better off we’ll be for it.”

The Ireland boss, like every other member of the international rugby coaching fraternity, would like nothing better than to keep his players together and carry on with the work he has begun with his squad over the last five weeks.

“More matches. I wish I had another four or five games,” Kidney said. “I think it’s an advantage that the Southern Hemisphere teams have when they come over here after four months together. We’ve five weeks together. I like to think we’ve made improvements. Imagine what we might have done if we played two weeks later and we’d have had two weeks more training. You like to think you’d make that progression.”

Kidney will be in the position he desires 10 months from now, with four August matches against Scotland, France (twice) and England before heading to New Zealand for the 2011 World Cup, where Ireland will face four group matches in successive weeks in their bid to reach the knockout stages.

This past month will stand to his players for that and the lead-in will help Kidney get the quality time he craves to bring a fully developed squad to the boil in time for the biggest challenge of his coaching career.

He would hope Ireland are by then comfortable with the brand of expansive, ball-in-hand rugby he has decided they should play, of which glimpses were seen this autumn, most notably in the 20-point defeat to New Zealand.

The errors elsewhere, in terms of handling and decision-making, have pointed to suggestions that the move to such a style has come too late to make a meaningful impact at the forthcoming World Cup.

It is a contention Kidney disputes, while defending the timing of the switch in gameplans.

“A year ago we’d just won a Grand Slam playing a certain way and then there was a change of law emphasis.

“We’d won this time last year, managed to get the better of South Africa in a close match, so things weren’t too bad. Then there was a change of law emphasis in the middle of the Six Nations. That wasn’t the time to do it.

“We went then to Australia and New Zealand and we were trying to adjust to it there and then and there were a few lads injured and stuff like that so we were doing it under tough circumstances. But we’ve moved on a bit and this is our first time back into it again.

“If we go and try and play the way we did two years ago whereby you set two targets inside your own half and kick it down you end up defending all day. So I don’t think there’s a choice.”

As it stands, a Six Nations campaign, which will hopefully mark the return to the colours of the likes of star lock Paul O’Connell and first-choice scrum-half Tomás O’Leary, and those four World Cup warm-ups stand between Ireland and their tournament opener on September 11 against the USA in New Plymouth.

Kidney is happy with the progress made to this point.

“What pleased me the most was they stuck at it as a squad,” he said of the autumn games. “There’s been a number of changes and developing a squad is never quite as easy, so there’s a huge generosity that has to be shown off the pitch. It’s an unseen and an intangible thing, so for fellas to buy into that I think is a great credit to all of them.

“On the pitch they’re getting more comfortable making decisions and understanding that if they make a decision they won’t be castigated for making the wrong one but they’ll look to learn from each one.

“That’s a positive and the negative, in my perverse way I see the negative as a positive, imagine when we start getting our lineout ticking and kick-off receipts ticking and we don’t allow ourselves to get counter-rucked on a day like Sunday, then that’s how many balls?”

Enough to get Ireland at least on the same page as the Southern Hemisphere giants Kidney seeks to emulate.