Ireland aim to 'dismantle' Scottish pack at Murrayfield 

LOCKED AND LOADED: Ireland scrum coach John Fogarty. Picture: Ben Brady/Inpho

Ireland’s forwards will go to Murrayfield this Sunday tasked with “dismantling” Scotland’s pack to keep their Guinness Six Nations title defence alive.

Wednesday’s media session at the IRFU High Performance Centre in Abbottstown, west Dublin, saw a string of players and assistant coach John Fogarty heap praise on the Scots’ “world-class backline” steered by fly-half Finn Russell yet there is a belief within the Irish camp that their forward pack can be a point of difference in Edinburgh when they bid for an 11th successive victory over their Celtic cousins.

The back-to-back Six Nations champions got their 2025 campaign, and life under interim head coach Simon Easterby, up and running with a 27-22 bonus-point victory over England at Aviva Stadium last Saturday that was not without its challenges. 

They faced an aggressive visiting breakdown and linespeed for much of the first half, trailing 10-5 at half-time, secured victory with four tries in a dominant period between minutes 34 and 71 but then conceded two late tries.

“We talk about making sure we’re staying connected, leaving our mistakes behind us, the little bits,” scrum coach Fogarty said. “We have a very experienced group of players, a very experienced squad. There is good youth in the squad as well, there are brilliant learnings that come from that and there is a resilience that comes from that, and a belief that comes from fixing things.

“We want to see those things improve this week, and we want to grow all that stuff as we go through the tournament.

“I spoke to the pack and then the scrum about, there were bits that were good in the English match but we don’t deserve anything next week because those parts were good.

“We’re now in a place where we need to make sure that any fix-ups are done, that our mentality is in the right place and I can’t say that enough, that we go and attack any team we come up against, but that this week we attack a Scottish pack in the right way.

“There is good experience in our pack, there is good belief in what we’re doing, there’s great buy-in from the group. We understand it’s going to be a battle, a war over there, as it always is, but our intent is to go and dismantle that pack. That’s the intent of any pack that goes out to play.” 

Fogarty had a similar warning about the defensive record required, despite Ireland limiting the Scots’ much-vaunted attack to no more than seven points in each of their last three championship meetings.

“Simon (Easterby) does defence and he talks an awful lot about us being connected, both sides of the ruck. Heightened awareness, he identifies threats very well and the guys would have a heightened awareness when you play against a team like Scotland so that we do stay connected, that we don't spend too long on the ground; that we're identifying guys, we’re calling guys out.

“I think we've done that well in the past, but it doesn't mean it's going to be perfect as we go forward. We want to be connected, we want to be taking time and space away from them.

“You give Finn Russell loads of time and space and it looks impossible to beat him. So we want to make sure we're going after them together and we're limiting time, we're limiting their time to see space, we’re limiting their times to make decisions.

“So they're the areas Simon would talk about and we need to focus on as we go towards Sunday.”