Simon Easterby: Gibson-Park a 'dream player' for Andy Farrell's Ireland

Jamison Gibson-Park during training with the Ireland squad. Pic: Henry Simpson/Inpho

It’s the beauty of rugby that, in a game populated by giants, a man standing just 5’ 9” can stand head and shoulders above the rest. That man in Twickenham last Saturday was Jamison Gibson-Park.

Take James Lowe out of the equation after his early injury and every man jack who started for the visitors scored highly in the infamous player ratings pieces that proliferated in the wake of the bonus-point win.

Nines and eights were almost par for the course but only two men did enough to merit the rarely-spotted ten. Stuart McCloskey has been nicknamed ‘The Irish Fridge’ after his rampage in London, but Gibson-Park was the heartbeat of everything that was good.

“I guess he's tough, and a lot of nines are tough, but he's tough,” said Ireland defence coach Simon Easterby. “Robust. He sees things early and both sides of the ball. He's got an appetite to attack the game [and] you saw some of his defensive efforts on the weekend.

“It's a dream for a coaching group to have a nine that leads from the front. Sometimes you're careful, but that's not in his nature. But, yes, he's right up there in terms of his speed of delivery, his speed of thought, obviously his speed of movement.”

News this week has it that Luke McGrath will be leaving Leinster for Perpignan at the end of this season. McGrath is almost a year younger than Gibson-Park, and he was his club’s starter at nine and a regular in the national squad until 2020.

That was the year Andy Farrell took over and bumped the Kiwi-born option a handful of rungs up the ladder. From McGrath's provincial back-up to Test starter, he handled the elevation with ease and is still making people purr six years on.

Gibson-Park’s speed of thought in scoring Ireland’s first try off a quick tap against England was a key moment and he terrorised the fringe defence time and again with his quick heels. When he wasn’t providing service on a silver platter, that is.

And, as Easterby said, he was brave as a lion without the ball as well.

Craig Casey could learn so much from Gibson-Park. Pic: Ben Brady/Inpho

Gibson-Park has been world-class for a long time, but not every time. There have been periods when the A+ rating has slipped, and he found himself relegated to the bench for the round two visit of Italy to Dublin after the team’s struggles in Paris.

Now 34, he admitted earlier this month that the demotion had lit a fire under him and, in that, Farrell will have the totemic example to reference any time another senior player finds himself out of favour on the back of a poor run or two.

Easterby referenced Craig Casey and Nathan Doak as players who could still take so much from Gibson-Park’s game. The first of those is 26, a man entering his prime, the latter is already 24. These are not babes in the woods here.

“We've got some great nines in the country that will want to go and emulate the sort of stuff that Jamison has done. But on the weekend he was right up there as probably… Maybe one other guy in world rugby that's close to him playing in the same position, but pretty close.” No prizes for guessing the reference there.

The round four game against Wales in Ballsbridge next Friday will mark Gibson-Park’s 50th cap for his adopted country, and it will highlight again just how pivotal he has become to the well-being of this team as it closes in on the next World Cup.

The aging process being experienced by the scrum-half, James Lowe and Bundee Aki has been a cause of some concern for Ireland given the three-year residency ruling that allowed them play for Ireland has long been extended to five.

Now McCloskey has burst the banks of expectation with his displays in midfield while Robert Baloucoune has grabbed with both hands the opportunity handed to him on the wing by an injury to Lowe which now leaves him sidelined for the rest of the Six Nations.

Of the three, Gibson-Park is the only one that still looks irreplicable.

The immediate challenge, as individuals and a collective, is to harness the intensity and the accuracy of Twickenham and reproduce that against a Welsh side that, on form, presents a far lesser threat than the one they just faced down.

Easterby has promised that there is no resting on laurels this week.

“Definitely enjoy the good moments in games, and understand some of the efforts players put in to give us good moments both sides of the ball.

“But I always feel like, even when we have had moments and success, we have gone hard on the fact that other teams might have taken more opportunities to win the game.

“Should we have beaten them by more? Should we not have let them create or generate those chances? As a group in my time under Faz, it has always been the way.”