Gaffney interested in taking chances – not revenge
The previous day Jamie Heaslip said the Irish players were looking for “payback” over the incident in March, in which Welsh hooker Matthew Rees took a quick throw-in from which Mike Phillips scored a game-changing try en route to a home victory at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium.
Ireland went from 13-9 ahead to 16-13 down after the try was converted and Wales ran out 19-13 winners — but the five-pointer should not have stood because the quick throw was taken with a different ball than the one kicked into touch by Jonny Sexton and was therefore illegal.
Gaffney though, said there was not any lingering bitterness over the incident, as both teams arrived in Wellington ahead of Saturday’s match, Ireland following their 36-6 win over Italy in Dunedin and Wales after thumping Fiji 66-0 in Hamilton.
“No, that’s gone,” the backs coach said of any residual anger. “The guys are fully professional in that regard, they just move along from game to game. There was a bit of euphoria in the dressing room [on Sunday], obviously, about qualifying but that’s gone and they’re back on level ground again.
“The Irish boys, if you start getting beyond yourself you’re brought back to earth pretty quickly. That’s always the case.”
Gaffney conceded that in hindsight, losing to Wales in the manner Ireland did may not have been the setback initially imagined in March but there were other valid reasons for the defeat.
“No, maybe no bad thing in hindsight, that was the nature of it. But there were that many opportunities left out there on the park. I’ve gone through the game again a couple of days ago and it actually brings tears to your eyes to see some of the tries we left out there that night. It wasn’t out there for any other reason except for the fact that we weren’t accurate that night and we didn’t take the opportunities we should have.”
With a very strong defensive line organised by Wales assistant coach Shaun Edwards, try-scoring opportunities were not to be taken lightly, Gaffney added.
He said: “They are difficult to break down. They’ve got a different defensive structure to anybody else in the competition so it’s something we’ve got to deal with.
“We understand what they do and how they do it and at this point in time we’ve got a pretty good handle on how to approach it.
” If the game develops and breaks up they’ve got some very good attacking backs and they’re exploiting them more, probably, than what they’ve done in recent times. But then again, we think we’re not too bad at broken-field play either. So we wouldn’t particularly mind that ourselves.”
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