'Good teams bounce back' - Andy Farrell's rallying call to Ireland players after All Blacks defeat

BOUNCE BACK: Ireland head coach Andy Farrell has issued a rallying call to his players. Pic: Brian Lawless/PA Wire.

The carrot or the stick. A whisper in the ear and an arm around the shoulder or a high decibel roar of disapproval.

Andy Farrell left Aviva Stadium on Friday night pondering which would be the best approach to take in order to provoke a positive response following a deeply disappointing 23-13 defeat to New Zealand.

An error-strewn and inaccurate performance had gifted the All Blacks invaluable opportunities to get their own back for a historic first home series defeat by the Irish in 2022, not least the 13 penalties, 21 handling errors and 30 missed tackles.

That allowed the tourists to give further momentum to first-year head coach Scott Robertson after a below-par Rugby Championship. Damian McKenzie kicked six penalties, three in a row unanswered by Ireland after they had taken a 13-9 lead through a Josh van Flier try converted by Jack Crowley, and before full-back Will Jordan kept up his record of scoring a try whenever he faces the Irish – five times now - to kill off the contest on 68 minutes.

The Ireland boss had declined to raise his voice in the immediate aftermath of a first loss at the Aviva since February 2021 and the end of a 19-match winning streak. Yet he was already weighing his options for when his players returned to camp on Sunday night to begin preparations for this Friday’s Autumn Nations Series dust-up with Argentina.

"I don't know, I'll see how I feel and the mood, but no, sometimes you need a bit of help to try and pick the mood up,” Farrell said.

"Sometimes a bollocking is when you get a reaction. Sometimes you need to nurture as well.”

What is certain is that Ireland need to regain some momentum after a self-inflicted defeat in a match that fell woefully short of the high-octane fare these two teams served up 13 months ago in an epic World Cup quarter-final at Stade de France.

Argentina arrived in Ireland on Sunday with confidence brimming following a blistering second half in Udinese which saw Felipe Contepomi’s side dispatch Italy 50-18 to build on their best Rugby Championship showing of a win against each of their Southern Hemisphere rivals and Farrell will take nothing for granted that his team will be able to “get back on the horse” as he prescribed last Friday night without a serious amount of hard work this week.

What does not concern him, however, is that his team’s momentum or confidence has been dented by this reverse for a team which successfully landed back-to-back Six Nations titles and then tied a two-Test series in South Africa against the world champion Springboks in tis two previous Test windows.

“You don’t become a bad side in one game do you?” Farrell ventured when asked if he was concerned about this most recent performance.

“I said I was excited about the game, about how we prepared and how we trained, and sometimes – most of the time for us – that transfers. Today it didn’t.

“Good teams bounce back don’t they? So we’ll see what we’re about. We’ve tended to do that in the past.

“It’s amazing isn’t it because we’re the ones that’s brought the expectation so we’ve got to get back on the horse and build it again. After one game, it’s amazing really isn’t it that we’re talking about shit like that.”

Instead, Farrell offered different conversation topics, chief of which was “finding solutions” in the coming days.

“That’s everyone’s friend, isn’t it? When you’ve got solutions. You tend to get over yourself and move forward.”

His squad will need to find a way to right the wrongs they perpetrated against the All Blacks, particularly the negative impact of what the head coach saw as “compounding errors” and failing to retain possession consistently well enough.

“Our lack of accuracy on the back of how we made ourselves feel is something that we’ve been very good at actually, staying pretty level-headed. Through the good times and the bad times, it’s something that we’ve been pretty good at, to keep managing our way through the game but I thought we compounded too much stuff and therefore our mood wasn’t what it should have been and both of those things aren’t right.”

And when Ireland return to the training field at the IRFU High Performance Centre on Monday, Farrell knows exactly what he wants to see.

"A bit of character that we know we've got, we know what we're about. After any type of defeat you want to see a reaction and we'll need a reaction because we've got a good team coming here next week.

“They play some really good rugby. Obviously we've been watching a lot of them lately through the Championship and they play tomorrow, so interested to see how they carry on the form but obviously they have taken their game to another level and had some big wins, and they'll certainly be coming here looking for a victory.

"So hence why we have to get back on the horse… that's the medicine that everyone wants, you know, another game.”