Gaffney: We will stick with game plan

IRELAND attack coach Alan Gaffney has backed the side’s commitment to ball-in-hand rugby but admitted a win against Scotland on Sunday would be a timely affirmation of their current approach.

It was against the Scots in the final Six Nations game of the season last year when Ireland served notice of their intention to tweak their attacking style but it was an afternoon that ended with a dispiriting defeat at Croke Park. Rightly or wrongly, there has been a line of thinking that it was a turning point of sorts, with results in the meantime giving some credence to the suggestion that it is a loss from which Declan Kidney’s side have yet to recover.

Gaffney doesn’t agree.

“I don’t,” said the Australian. “We have moved on a lot from there. It is the inaccuracy really … We just have to get our execution right … I don’t think it goes back to then.

“We are playing a game now that we very much enjoy playing. We know we have got to be more accurate if we want to play with the big boys.

“New Zealanders are very comfortable with the ball and control it for two or three minutes without a problem, so can Australia. I am not saying that we are trying to do what they do but we still want to play a bit with the ball in hand.”

Ireland’s attempts to master such a strategy have been crippled by a catalogue of errors – 17 against Italy in Rome and another 14 in the Dublin defeat to France – and Gaffney admits that a hint of “anxiousness” has crept in to the camp.

The fact is that balls are being dropped in training as well as on match days in recent weeks and Gaffney accepts that Ireland have got “to set the bar higher”, starting at Murrayfield.

“It would give us more confidence,” said Gaffney of a potential win in Edinburgh. “At present, every player would support the way we want to play because they are enjoying the way we play. We are just not getting the results because we are not executing (things correctly). But if we go out there and perform the way we know we can and get that result the confidence level would rise enormously.”

An affable sort of character under normal conditions, there was an unmistakable air of testiness about Gaffney’s reply when quizzed on the strategy and the ongoing Jonathan Sexton/Ronan O’Gara debate at 10.

Gaffney felt that Sexton actually played very well against the French in round two and he took issue with the suggestion that Ireland had somehow ‘run everything’ in D4.

In actual fact, Sexton passed the ball just 10 times while kicking twice, but his performance was coloured by the arrival of O’Gara, who instantly launched a kick that propelled Ireland into the French 22.

“You’ve got to rely on the players,” Gaffney said of what happens on the pitch. “I’ll back them. You have got to back their judgement and the day I take the flair out of the player is the day I stop coaching.”

If there is one position discussed more deeply in Ireland right now than that of 10, it is that of scrum-half, no more so than yesterday when it emerged that Peter Stringer had been called back into camp.

Though the official IRFU release said it was to act as cover for Tomás O’Leary, Gaffney painted a different picture in that O’Leary’s back condition did not prevent him from taking a full part in training yesterday.

Kidney will name his starting side at lunchtime today and it will be an interesting selection given the fact that the former Munster coach made four switches to his side on the last occasion they visited Edinburgh. Among them was the elevation of Stringer in place of O’Leary.