O’Brien launches spirited defence of coach Kidney

Sean O’Brien insists that Declan Kidney and his Ireland management team remain the best men for the job of driving the national 15 forward despite last Saturday’s record 60-0 defeat to New Zealand in the third Test.

That loss superseded the previous low point against the reigning world champions — a 53-point hammering in Wellington 20 years before — and marked the first time since 1924 that an Irish side had failed to score against the men in black.

The loss brought to an end a tour which saw Kidney’s side score just 29 points while conceding 124 and marked the end of the third season since the 2009 Grand Slam where the Ireland side has failed to hit its straps.

“The coaching staff, I’ve always said it, is top class there,” said O’Brien yesterday when launching a new range of Specsavers SuperTough lenses for children. “How can you blame a coach for losing 60-0? You can’t. In fairness, it’s us [the players] and we have to take it on the chin.

“It’s not good enough as international players representing your country and with the support we have to go out and get hockeyed like that. It was embarrassing, to be honest. But that’s on our backs and we’ll live with that for a while and we’ll have that hurt for a while. The next time we put on the green shirt we better do it justice.”

It may have been a traumatic, dispiriting tour but O’Brien spoke of positives that had been hauled from the wreckage before returning to the team’s lack of consistency, a topic which has haunted this side for far too long.

That inability to deliver anything approaching a game-to-game standard capable of producing the required performances and results is being highlighted all the more by the continued successes of the provinces.

“It is a bit frustrating but it’s a massive step from provincial rugby to international rugby,” said O’Brien. “Regardless of how many Heineken Cups the provinces have won together and leagues and what not, it’s a different ball game.

“We might be guilty of not starting well. We need to fire on all cylinders from the word go and that’s what we kind of said going into that second Test over there, to start well, but we just have to do that every week we go out.

“That’s a thing that teams get so used to, when you’re in a flow and you’re winning games and you’re playing well, it’s hard to get knocked off that. If we can get that consistency we’ll be a very hard team to stop.”

O’Brien spoke of taking the lessons learned in New Zealand into the November internationals against South Africa and Argentina at Lansdowne Road and it appears he may well be there to apply some himself despite reports on Monday he would be sidelined until December.

The Tullow forward will undergo surgery on a hip injury this Monday and is aiming for a four-month rehabilitation period which would, in theory, make him available for the Tests on November 10 and 24.

“I am a fairly quick healer. Any bad injury I have had I have always got back before time.

“That’s not to say I will be back before time. I have to come back when I am right and ready to go hard.”

The problem has afflicted him since the World Cup.

He admitted that it had restricted his range of motion and flexibility while decreasing his power in contact and explosiveness with ball in hand but there have been some positive knock-ons too.

“At the start of the year I was frustrated because I was trying to keep that bar as high as I could but I had to find different ways of going about things and I have learned a lot this season about other aspects of the game and learned about different things at the ruck and stuff.

“Maybe I haven’t made as many breaks as last year but I think I have improved other parts of my game.”