Earls takes giant step towards filling O’Driscoll’s boots

Declan Kidney hailed his team for overcoming the loss of two iconic captains, Brian O’Driscoll and Paul O’Connell, to bring the smile back to Irish rugby.

While his Scotland counterpart Andy Robinson struggling to find excuses for this latest reversal, Kidney had the pleasure of watching Keith Earls take another giant step towards filling O’Driscoll’s boots.

“I thought Keith [Earls] has been going very well,” he said. “Brian’s injury is unfortunate but I think Keith has had a chance and what has been nice is he has come in to do his own job and do it as well as he can.

“He hasn’t been living under anyone’s shadow. When you consider Brian has been in that jersey for so long that’s great credit to him for being just his own man.”

Ireland’s ability to overcome the injuries and strike with a comprehensive victory was also pleasing.

“Every coach will try and make it [the squad] as strong as possible,” said Kidney.

“What we’ve done is after a World Cup, we’re out of the Churchill Cup so it was important to rotate guys in and out of camp because we wouldn’t have huge numbers playing.

“We work with the provinces well I think and all told I think we had around 50 players in and out of camp that are Irish-qualified. I would say 90% of those who are playing Heineken Cup have been in with us. What we need to do is develop that strength. I think for a few lads they would get a bit of solace out of that today. We’ve a small island with five professional teams overlapping with players. We just need to keep working together. Today doesn’t really solve anything. What have we played, four? Two wins, a draw and a loss, so we’re far from the finished article.”

Unusually for Kidney, he had a pop at refereeing as he elaborated on a discussion he had with IRB referee manager Paddy O’Brien following Ireland’s draw with France to express concerns with decisions made by England’s Dave Pearson.

“Refereeing a game is a tough job and you don’t want to be nit-picking about one-off decisions like the one earlier about the try [Bowe]. I was just concerned there was a trend there. You’re just looking to try to stand up for your team. That’s what we did.

“It’s just important because sometimes a team can get a reputation for doing stuff wrong and we weren’t doing it wrong so it’s important to stand up for them. I’d have no problem in life putting my hand up when we get something wrong but we’ve been quite legal and we just didn’t want those penalties that were going against us to keep coming. I think it’s just important to have that on the record.”

Scottish coach Robinson was unusually subdued and accepted that responsibility for the defeat had to be from within.

“We were in the game at the break but we didn’t play well enough in that second half to win. Our set piece, our line out particularly, didn’t function as we would have liked, we couldn’t string more than three phases together for most of it.”