Dominic Crotty: Ireland stutter to uninspiring win

Former Ireland and Munster full-back casts his eye over ireland's opening match in the 2008 RBS 6 Nations.

Ireland enjoyed - if that’s the correct word - an opening-day win against Italy at Croke Park last Saturday.

They mixed the excellent with the awful, and both the players and crowd seemed pretty deflated at the end of the game.

It was a performance that raises as many questions as it answers and leaves Ireland stuck in first gear, looking for that extra zip to overcome the inertia of self-inflicted problems. Far from exorcising the ghosts of the World Cup, this performance only exacerbated the frustrations of a team capable of so much more than it was delivering.

The first 20 minutes were very promising with Ronan O'Gara dictating play and the forwards really taking on their Italian counterparts; offloading, running hard at good angles, and generally controlling the pace of the game.

They played with an intensity that the Italians could not match, with Denis Leamy in particular having a fantastic first quarter.

To be sure, there were a few mistakes in that initial period but you thought that once these kinks were ironed out the Irish team would break loose. Unfortunately, that was not to be – what we ended up with was an error-strewn, forgettable performance.

Encouragingly, the scrum proved to be a really solid platform for Ireland and allowed the team to develop some great passages of play, especially the creation of the scintillating try in the first half that epitomized the innate brilliance of the players involved.

Great vision and play between Ronan and Geordan Murphy exploited an overlap from the scrum. The forwards made progress from a quickly recycled ball and then a pinpoint cross kick was brilliantly won by Andrew Trimble and allowed him give the deftest of offloads to Girvan Dempsey for an easy run in.

Thirty seconds of rugby at its best and it was rugby that the players are capable of doing at any point in the game, from anywhere on the pitch. They seem, however, to be playing in a straight jacket at times, so regimented in patterns that they lose the bit between the teeth that is so characteristic of Irish teams.

I don’t think it’s a general lack of confidence in the team, if that was the case then Ronan would have played safe and kicked from the initial scrum. I just feel they are not backing themselves and their own abilities and ‘having a go’ enough of the time.

Another bright spark too was the performance of Eoin Reddan at scrum-half, who really impressed and showed how dynamic a player he is – another example of how new blood gives the team fresh weapons to hurt opponents. The defence off the fringes of rucks was good and aggressive; it will need to be as aggressive, if not more so, next weekend in Paris.

I said at the opening that I believe many of the team’s problems are self-inflicted. Mistakes on the pitch have both a physical and psychological component to them and, to a point, will happen in any game with every player and there’s no accounting for it beforehand, that’s just part and parcel of sport.

Dropped passes and passes going behind players will happen. However, Ireland’s unforced error count is consistently too high for a team that wishes to compete at the top level.

The error rate may have decreased over the years if there was increased competition for places, but the team selection policy, winning every game (even 'worthless' friendlies), instead of blooding and developing new talent for the future, has allowed a situation to develop where the cupboard of viable back-up players is getting bare and an apparent establishment of first team players has taken hold.

Although it’s easy to be a Monday-morning quarterback on these issues, this lack of competition may be contributing to errors that now cripple the team game after game after game.

In any case, the solution is a long-term one and will not affect next week’s match. In the immediate future, the enforced layoff of Gordon D’Arcy, although really unfortunate on a personal level, will hopefully increase competition and maybe there will be a bump in the standard of play with players breathing down each other’s necks for spots on the team.