Kidney’s problems run deep

There is nothing like a thorough drubbing to focus the mind of a coach and the truly dismal nature of this Ireland performance in London on Saturday will require Declan Kidney to be deep in thought for most of the next couple of months before he sees his players again.

Ireland’s weird and not very wonderful RBS 6 Nations campaign took a final turn towards the absurd at Twickenham on the last day of the championship as Kidney’s men were rolled over by a committed, powerful and not very ambitious England side.

It was the second straight defeat to the English this season, following a 20-9 World Cup warm-up loss in Dublin last August, and while the Irish were bullied at the breakdown that day, the source of this defeat could be found both in the scrum and the appallingly high number of handling errors.

Kidney pointed to the loss of tighthead prop Mike Ross in the 36th minute as the cause of the problem at scrum time. The Leinster front-rower had succumbed to a neck injury sustained, said the head coach, during the first and telling collision of the encounter, when England set the tone with a big shove in the first minute that earned them the first of nine scrum penalties and also led to a second-half penalty try that effectively put the game beyond the hapless visitors.

The dominance enjoyed by England’s pack, and their young loosehead Alex Corbisiero in particular, exposed Ireland to what has been the team management’s worse fears — that with Ross as the only recognised tighthead in the country with anywhere near the game time at provincial level, his loss can spell catastrophe for one of the fundamental planks of their game plan — the set-piece.

So dependent on the Corkman have Ireland become in the short time since he assumed the mantle of John Hayes at the start of the 2011 Six Nations that Ross had been used for all but two minutes in this campaign, being called ashore for the first time this season in the 78th minute of the previous week’s win over Scotland.

“Look, everyone knew that if Mike Ross went down that we could be in trouble,” Kidney admitted.

The 45 minutes that the primarily loosehead prop Tom Court had to endure on Saturday in place of Ross must have felt as much of an eternity to Kidney as they did to the Australian-born Ulsterman as Corbisiero continued his wrecking spree alongside Dylan Hartley and tighthead Dan Cole.

The experience will strengthen the IRFU’s stance on its proposal to limit the number of overseas players in any one position but as the Irish coach said, the short-term solution is a little more difficult to achieve.

“That’s something where the word fast-track is difficult but unless we take some affirmative action, you know, we just have to have some Irish tighthead props coming through,” Kidney said.

Would that inequality at the scrum was the only problem to occupy his mind in the coming weeks before Ireland return to New Zealand in June for a gruelling and potentially morale-sapping three-Test tour against the world champion All Blacks. A lack of consistency, even within 80-minute periods, has been a deeply troubling characteristic of this campaign. From the intensity-free opening and narrow defeat to a Wales side with plenty of front-five injury issues, to the Jekyll and Hyde performance either side of the interval against Italy that was repeated in Paris a week later with altogether more damaging con-sequences, Ireland have failed to put together anything near a complete performance this springtime.

Yet there have been glimmers of the Ireland this set of players can be, a statement underlined by the fact that Kidney’s side took their beating on Saturday and failed to score a try yet still ended the tournament’s top try scorers. That is what has convinced Kidney that this set of players did not career permanently off the road in the Twickenham rain on Saturday.

“I know we’re a better side than winning two and drawing one but what we need to do is to become, you know, the consistency they need to bring through,” he said. “No it’s not era ending, this is a completely different side from the side that won a Grand Slam.”

Kidney now has the bones of 10 weeks to come up with something else to reboot his tenure as memories of that 2009 Grand Slam slip further and further into the back of the mind.

ENGLAND: B Foden (M Brown 71); C Ashton, M Tuilagi, B Barritt, D Strettle; O Farrell, L Dickson (B Youngs, 48); A Corbisiero, D Hartley (L Mears 76), D Cole (M Stevens 76); M Botha (T Palmer, 55), G Parling; T Croft, C Robshaw (capt), B Morgan (P Dowson 76).

IRELAND: R Kearney; T Bowe, K Earls, G D’Arcy (R O’Gara 48), A Trimble (F McFadden 74); J Sexton, E Reddan (T O’Leary 48); C Healy, R Best (capt) (S Cronin 78), M Ross (T Court 36); D O’Callaghan (M McCarthy 67), D Ryan; S Ferris, S O’Brien (P O’Mahony 70), J Heaslip.

Referee: Nigel Owens (Wales).