Van der Flier puts quality over quantity

Three years and change since Richie McCaw quit being the ruination of many an opponent’s rucks and, while the New Zealander didn’t make many friends doing what he did, he continues to influence the breakdown.

Josh van der Flier used to find himself fixating on the number of turnovers he could post. However the kind of numbers that catches the average punter’s attention can be all too misleading and shallow a barometer.

Like that one about kilometres run that pops up on screen during football matches.

“That was the big thing for me anyway watching McCaw and (David) Pocock, when you see on the TV however many turnovers they got in the game. “What actually changed my mindset was that I was reading a bit of McCaw’s book a few years ago.

“He said he stopped looking at the number of turnovers he got but looked at how effective he was with the number of chances he had. That’s probably more the way I’d look at it now. Sometimes I might end up going to too many breakdowns — as in I’m not needed. I’m just parked up doing nothing and sometimes I was needed in a breakdown and the ball slowed down because I didn’t get there. So I try and read it as I go and make sure where I should be and not be wasted I suppose.”

There has been no lack of theories as to the source of Ireland’s malaise through the first three rounds of this Six Nations but the side’s inability to boss the breakdown as they did this time last year, and in November, has been a primary source of concern. Turnovers are part of that and have been particularly thin on the ground. Only two have been claimed in the course of meetings with England, Scotland, and Italy, both by Peter O’Mahony.

Rugby is like any team sport in that it is a delicately balanced ecosystem. The ruck or the lineout or the attacking shape don’t exist in their own vacuums. They are co-dependent entities that make up the greater sum and damage in one department can leak into another.

Van der Flier touched on that before tomorrow’s meeting with France when, having been asked about the difficulties at the breakdown against England, he pointed to the visitors’ successes in dominating the tackle as the actual source of their difficulties. All this is being fed into the greater brains trust, on and off the park.

It’s one of the main things we focus on because obviously you can have all lovely set-plays, or little moves, or you can work on your plays once things break down and how to break down teams, but if the breakdown is slow, or it’s poor and you’re losing the ball, it’s all kind of pointless.

“So it is massive and gets stressed a lot during the week.”

The stakes this weekend are even higher than usual. Not just because of the stutters thus far, but because of the World Cup looming over the horizon and the scramble for places on that plane for Japan next autumn.

Sean Cronin’s omission from the 37-man training squad this last week dominating much of the discourse but the absence from the matchday 23 of Sean O’Brien tomorrow is, in a way, an even closer shot across the bows of players intent on booking their passage to the Far East.

O’Brien, when fit, was always considered an untouchable and, though Schmidt has spoken about a slightly different approach to team selection right now with that global prize in mind, this still stands as something of a signature moment in that respect. Van der Flier isn’t reading too deeply into what it could all mean.

“Everyone knows how competitive it is. I was in for the England game, on the bench for the next game and I am desperate to be playing. Everyone wants to be starting and that’s how competitive it is. I just feel fortunate, to be honest, to wear the Irish jersey.

“You take those chances when you can and you work as hard as you can to get those chances. That’s all I focus on rather than looking at ‘am I building towards the World Cup’ or that kind of thing, I wouldn’t really look at it in that way.”

Make of that what you will but it shouldn’t be forgotten that this is a player who has missed out on big days with club and country many times before due to injuries. So maybe he can be forgiven this once for parroting the ‘one game at a time’ line. His last experience of facing the French was the Six Nations opener last year when a serious knee injury ended his afternoon, and his season, early. That attrition rate in the back row is evident in the fact that it is a full year since the same trio started back-to-back there for Ireland.

“Obviously my goal is that you want to be starting every game, especially in the green jersey. It’s the goal to be so good that you can’t be dropped. That’s what you want and you want to be winning games for Ireland and for Leinster.”