Focused Ireland earn just rewards
Having tasted the high life and fun of Queenstown without a midget in sight, followed by a short stay in New Plymouth for the USA game that kicked off Ireland’s campaign eight days ago, head coach Declan Kidney decamped to the Auckland suburbs, where the only outside recreation within a kilometre of the team hotel appeared to be a supermarket and a petrol station.
If anything can focus the minds, it is a bit of cold, hard reality and while the players were not exactly on skid row, their week without distraction produced spectacular results.
It was the people rather than the place that swung it for Ireland, though, firing up a team that had lost all four of its warm-up Tests in August and struggled to brush aside the USA in the Pool C opener.
There was significant input from senior non-playing squad members such as Leo Cullen, Shane Jennings and Geordan Murphy, as forwards coach Gert Smal explained.
“I couldn’t have asked for more from the players; just the whole build-up and credit must go to Brian O’Driscoll and Paul O’Connell and guys not even in the team, like Jenno and Geordan Murphy,” Smal said.
“They were really good and the things they said during the week, not even being in the team, touched the players as well. They were really up for it.”
There was also a stirring jersey presentation ceremony made by soon-to-be departing comrade-in-arms Jerry Flannery, whose World Cup came to an abrupt end when the Munster hooker was struck down yet again by a calf problem.
It was suggested to Gordon D’Arcy that deploying Flannery to dish out the jerseys to the team was a clever psychological gambit by Kidney on the eve of a big match. Not a bit of it said the centre.
“I don’t think there’s anything clever about it. It was just circumstances unfortunately,” D’Arcy said. “Jerry’s World Cup is over. I’d be much happier winning today and Jerry being on the bench. So you’d be kind of trying to read between the lines if you were trying to say there was something else in it.
“It was an incredibly unlucky injury to a fantastic guy and for him to stand up in front of his peers (was incredible). It’s easy to go out in front of 60 or 70,000 people and play but to stand up in a room of 40 of your peers and present jerseys when you know you’re going home, that shows real balls.
“It is inspirational and it brought the team together and if you ask the other 29 guys, they’d tell you they’d prefer he was staying here and not making that presentation.”
For Keith Earls, the presentation was the final proof, as far as the wing was concerned, that Saturday night would belong to Ireland not Australia.
“We always had belief in ourselves, we knew our potential, there is always hype about the Southern Hemisphere teams, the way they run the ball and stuff like that, people enjoy watching them,” Earls said. “We knew, we spoke about it all week and with the emotion of Jerry giving us out our jerseys, we knew we weren’t going to lose it.
“I just had a good feeling in me that we were going to win. I’m just delighted that we proved a lot of people wrong.”
For D’Arcy, under particular pressure to perform after a run of poor form, the strong words throughout the week reinforced his belief that he owed his team-mates a big display.
“I was focusing on my game and trying to figure out and get the balance between what I was doing, what I was trying to do and playing to my strengths. And I was pretty happy with how it went (Saturday).
“But I think the big thing for us, for me... I was looking to get a big performance. Tackling is a mainstay and I knew I’d work hard in defence and I knew I could run down guys out wide but I knew if I could give my little bit on the go forward, even an inch or a yard over the line, that would be enough.”
He did, it was and although nothing will ease Flannery’s pain at departing this World Cup prematurely, he will have done so in the knowledge that he also contributed hugely to the cause.
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