Alexander: We were simply out-thought

IT is not often that a forward pack which has held its own against the All Blacks and Springboks in recent weeks receives a schooling, but that was the impression left on the Australians after feeling the benefits of an Irish scrummaging education at Eden Park.

Impressive displays against Tri Nations rivals had gone a long way to dismissing talk of the Wallabies having a weak scrum but Aussie fears returned after a harrowing 80 minutes at the hands of the Irish forwards during Saturday’s 15-6 Pool C upset for the number two ranked team in the world.

“Every scrum’s a contest...they were just better than us tonight,” admitted Australian tighthead prop Ben Alexander.

“We’ve got a good scrum and we’ll work hard and fix the errors and mistakes that we made. You won’t see another performance like that from the scrum, I promise.”

The Irish front five, spearheaded by man of the match Cian Healy, Rory Best and Mike Ross forced their Wallabies counterparts to concede five penalties at scrum time and Alexander admitted his duel with loosehead Healy had not gone according to plan.

“I thought Cian scrummaged very well. He’s very much improved. He was only young when I first played him, he’s a quality front row, very strong.

“There’s some stuff we do differently, tactics-wise, and I think they probably out-thought us at scrum time but hopefully, you know, England, they lost in the pool stages of the last World Cup, got thumped by South Africa and they went on and made the final. So, we’ll do our analysis, put it behind us and move forward. It’s not the end of the world, we’ll definitely bounce back.”

Ireland forwards coach Gert Smal called Healy’s performance “outstanding” and added: “He’s still a young prop but he’s got a great future in front of him.”

Smal said Ireland had targeted the perceived Australian insecurities.

“We kept reading about their scrum and how they don’t have a lot of confidence in that. So it was important when we got the opportunity to exploit that and see if we could get a bit more confidence there. That’s what we went for.”

The absence of the Wallabies’ main weapon at the breakdown, David Pocock, due to a back strain, was also another area to exploit for Smal, who had been preaching the importance of stopping him all week long.

“We spoke about Pocock the whole week, so they were ready for him and that focus transpired on the field.”

Pocock’s injury denied fans the chance to see him go toe to toe with Ireland’s European Player of the Year Sean O’Brien, who had been cast in the less comfortable role of number seven.

That was seen as having a stifling effect on O’Brien’s natural ball-carrying tendencies but Smal praised his and Stephen Ferris and Jamie Heaslip’s combined back row efforts.

“He’d probably prefer to play at six,” Smal said of O’Brien, “but with the combination we’ve got at the moment, the amount of ball-carriers we’ve got is outstanding. Everybody has to chip in and do the work of the seven.

“They said they were going to take us on up front and try and slow our ball down and those are the areas we concentrated on.”

Picture: Cian Healy: “He’s got a great future ahead of him,” says forwards coach Gert Smal.