VIDEO: Jittery audition for Cup hopefuls
For the likes of Gordon D’Arcy, Luke Fitzgerald, Isaac Boss and Dan Tuohy this will have been an uncomfortable few days spent in the knowledge that their big chance for a place in Ireland’s tournament squad of 31 came and went without them delivering their best lines.
Joe Schmidt spoke afterwards about how some players have always struggled to deliver their best at the season’s starting line, and how a few may benefit from further outings with their provinces, but the time for such luxuries is coming to an end.
Twenty-nine players have been handed starts now. Thirty-five have had some hand to play in the defeats of Wales and Scotland and two debuts have been awarded – to Jack Conan and Nathan White. A decent body of work in itself, but the difficult decisions lie ahead.
The Ireland coach has shied away from talk of cuts and culls and continues to declare that he retains an open mind about personnel and the numbers of players required to cover each position, but his thoughts will crystallise in a fortnight when Wales visit the Aviva for round three of the warm-ups.
Warren Gatland is guaranteed to field a stronger selection than the one that flirted with humiliation against Ireland nine days ago in Cardiff and Schmidt is approaching the stage now – halfway through the warm-up phase - where some of his front-liners will be itching to make long-awaited bows.
Peter O’Mahony, Robbie Henshaw, Conor Murray and Jonathan Sexton are among those surely tiring of the cotton-wool treatment, Paul O’Connell has had only 25 minutes while Cian Healy continues to look a long shot for even the last warm-up tie against England in London.
It is time to unleash some beasts.
“There’s some players who haven’t played yet who will be playing (against Wales),” said Schmidt. “Mathematically, there must be at least half-a-dozen of them who are likely to get a hit-out unless they need a hit-out somewhere else because they’re coming back from injury.
“But most of them are fully fit and we’ll see them and a few other guys who have played in these last two weeks get a hit out as well. The players now, as time gets closer, there’s a fair bit of anxiety. They want to be picked because they know every opportunity is really important to them.
“Those guys who haven’t played yet will be very keen to get out there. They’ll be impatient because they haven’t had a hit-out yet, but hopefully we can improve from Wales to England, and then Canada will be right in front of us very quickly.”
Schmidt will hope for a slicker production then than was the case in this scattergun encounter two days ago when tries for Chris Henry, Sean Cronin, Simon Zebo and Luke Fitzgerald were answered by five-pointers from Blair Cowan, Henry Pyrgos and Peter Horne.
The Ireland coach certainly got what he hoped for beforehand: a more searching examination than Wales had managed. Scotland obliged by leading at three separate junctures and prodding past the Irish 22 for the winning score as the game clock expired.
Vern Cotter still preferred to concentrate on the aspects his Scotland side got wrong and, if Schmidt was more positively inclined – at least on the surface – he accepted that Ireland’s defence was an area that had provided more food for thought than expected.
“We conceded three tries in the Six Nations – we conceded three tries last weekend and three tries this week.
“Last week a couple of tries were untidy and it was at the end of the game. The tries (Saturday), I thought Scotland played really well.
“They put the pressure on and we did miss tackles and once they were in behind you they didn’t say, ‘oh, we’ll let you off the hook’. They really went for us.”
Ireland missed 23 tackles in all and let the Scots make 454 metres with the ball. Such statistics were symbolic of a strangely passive Irish defence on a day when a slew of individual errors also hamstrung a side showing 14 changes from that which clicked so effortlessly in Cardiff.
Very few seemed immune to the epidemic of mistakes. Even Simon Zebo and Sean O’Brien, two of Ireland’s best performers, were guilty of basic errors at times against a largely experimental Scottish side that took a good half-hour to find its feet.
The ease with which the visitors found space and soft shoulders thereafter was strange to see and very un-Schmidt-like from Ireland, in fact, though the forwards in green performed the basics at scrum and lineout, and at the maul, without much spillage.
Most important of all, by some distance, was the confirmation that Ireland suffered no serious injuries, unlike the week before when Tommy O’Donnell’s World Cup dream was ended. In that light, if in few others, this proved to be a most satisfactory outing.
S Zebo; T Bowe, J Payne, G D’Arcy, L Fitzgerald; I Madigan, I Boss; D Kilcoyne, S Cronin, M Ross; D Toner, D Tuohy; J Conan, C Henry, S O’Brien.
N White for Ross (52); P O’Connell for Tuohy (55); R Strauss for Cronin, D Kearney for Bowe and Bent for Kilcoyne (all 59); J Murphy for Conan (64); E Reddan for Boss (67); P Jackson for Zebo (78).
R Jackson; S Lamont, R Vernon, P Horne, T Visser; G Tonks, H Pyrgos; R Grant, F Brown, J Welsh; J Hamilton, G Gilchrist; B Cowan, H Blake, D Denton.
G Reid for Grant (45); M Cusack for Welsh (47); R Ford for Brown (52); R Harley for Hamilton (56); J Barclay for Cowan (58); M Scott for Vernon (61); S Hidalgo-Clyne for Pyrgos (66).
P Gauzere (FFR).
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