Ross rules when push comes to shove
That’s your Test match intensity right there.
The perspiration on the tighthead’s brow was a sight to savour given the buckets of the stuff lost prior to these November internationals by a nation nervous over his five-week absence through injury and all the ‘will-he-won’t-he’ injury updates.
For all the high-fiving over Ireland’s three-from-three and the previously undiscovered subterranean strength in depth of the squad at large, Ross remains a cornerstone without which the whole edifice could still come crumbling down.
It’s been that way since he assumed the No 3 jersey from the indispensable John Hayes and the long-term injury to his provincial back-up Marty Moore and then Connacht’s Nathan White.
“You can do all the off-field conditioning you want, but games are a different kettle of fish,” Ross admitted when asked just how confident he had been of pitching in with two 80-minute displays against South Africa and Australia. “At the same time, it was a bit of an opportunity to freshen up a bit.
“What takes it out of you isn’t actually contact and hitting each other, so I didn’t feel too bad against South Africa. But out there (on Saturday) it was pretty frenetic. A lot of covering back and forth and I was starting to feel it a bit.”
Maybe, but Ross was nonetheless fresh enough to play a key role in that crucial 74th minute scrum inside Ireland’s 22. The penalty thwarted Australia’s last concerted effort to turn this game of miniscule margins decisively in their favour.
Ross is a self-confessed scrum nerd. Time and again his interviews get drawn towards the mechanics of that baffling set-piece under the game’s hood and there are few rugby mechanics who can stay crouched under there and follow his discourse.
Not his fault, just a by-product of his speciality, and yet there was something captivating about the tale he told of that particular engagement which, as ever, he relayed with an eye for detail that was as precise as keyhole surgery.
“We knew first off we couldn’t give away a penalty because it was right beneath the sticks. We had to be as legal as possible and we’d taken them a bit lower in the previous couple. They seemed a bit less confident than they had been. We dropped it a little bit, kept the pressure down and through and waited to see who would blink first. The ball stayed in the tunnel for a bit … I don’t know … head down and push, make sure you don’t give them an angle.
“They’ve two game-breakers on in Quade Cooper and Kurtley Beale. We just wanted to give our back-row every chance. The longer it went on, we just kept dropping and dropping. Suddenly something gave.
“God, when I was getting up and heard the whistle, I was (thinking) ‘ffffffff ’which way is this going to go. Because you never know. You think you might (win it). But you never know. Thankfully, it was for us.”
A tighthead’s equivalent of a penalty, as someone said to him, and yet Ross was honest enough to stress again that there are three or four weak joints in every collapsed scrum and any one of which a referee could single out as culpable.
Had it been an Irish player pinged this could have been a game lost by a breath rather than one won and ask any player to rate their performances this month and the self-assessment is ruthless. Joe Schmidt ruthless.
Still and all, look at them now. Six Nations champions and none of the other northern hemisphere sides have claimed a single SANZAR scalp, let alone the two stuffed in Ireland’s pelts as they turn towards 2015.
“It’s a good barometer to see where you’re at,” said Ross who is now the only player to have started all of the 13 internationals under Schmidt in the last 13 months.
“You don’t get to play the Southern Hemisphere guys very often and, inevitably, they’re in the shake- up in the knockout stages of a World Cup. The fact that we have two wins here is encouraging. But now we’re going to have to go away and do that in order to be really contenders.”
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