Ronan Kelleher: Last year's Springbok scrum mauling 'drives you on'

Ireland will turn their focus to the Springboks, after Saturday night's win over Fiji.

Ireland's Ronan Kelleher scores his side's third try against Fiji on Saturday. Pic: INPHO/Dan Clohessy

One day shy of a year will have passed since their last coming together when Ireland and South Africa take to the Lansdowne Road turf next Saturday. Every living, breathing soul in the stadium will hold their breath before the first scrum.

The magnitude of Ireland’s problems in the course of that 11-point defeat in 2025 couldn’t be hidden by a scoreline that flattered the hosts. It was an utter sundering of their setpiece. For hardened pros it must have been an acute embarrassment.

Andrew Porter, one of two loosehead props sinbinned for those failings, spent a lot of the next 12 moths sidelined but admitted recently that the game last November had filtered through his thoughts at plenty of points on his journey back.

Ronan Kelleher came off the bench with 24 minutes to play that day. If he didn’t suffer the same torture over the same amount of time then the Leinster hooker sat with the experience in much the same way.

“It was a tough day, particularly, at scrum time. And for us in the front row, it's something that drives you on a bit. It's something that you obviously just have to take the learnings from. You have to take it on the chin. It definitely, at times, drove us last season.” 

Ireland’s scrum has been pretty good in the last two weeks against Argentina and Fiji. They claimed four scrum penalties against Jake White’s team on Saturday night but Kelleher doesn’t lay claim to any sweeping changes there.

There has been “no drastic overhaul” but any gains made so far in November will be sorely tested by a Springbok setpiece that went a step further than in Dublin last year with the pulverising put on their French counterparts in Saint-Denis.

The world champions earned eight penalties, two free-kicks and will probably argue that referee Angus Gardner didn’t punish the French enough in terms of yellows and towards the game’s end when their dominance wasn’t adequately rewarded.

Regis Montagne was the only French player sent to stew on the naughty step for ten minutes as a result of a suffering scrum and the question had to be asked on Friday as to how many ‘final’ warnings a team actually gets before enough is enough.

The old ‘no scrum, no win’ maxim didn’t ring true this time but it’s impossible to see South Africa losing again in Dublin if they engineer the same sort of platform. Kelleher and the rest of the Ireland squad watched it unfold in the team hotel.

“First off, it was some game. And yeah, as you touched on, very high intensity. It looked unbelievably physical as well. We were watching it in the team room, we've just had it on but we'll delve a bit deeper into it now during this week.

“We’ll see what we can take away from that performance from the South Africans. As I'm just saying, we're focused on us, what we can do to get better and we'll obviously review that game that we played just there. Yeah, all raring to go for next week.” 

Fiji’s scrum was no prep for what is to come next but White’s side did ask Ireland questions that will serve as a road map for what to do and what direction they really shouldn’t travel when Rassie Erasmus and the rest materialise.

Kelleher wasn’t the only Irish player or coach to touch on the fact that they came second best in too many collisions in a poor first-half. Fiji ended the game with eight dominant tackles to three. They were equally physical with ball in hand as in defence.

The Ireland hooker did take note of Fiji’s increased kicking game and commitment to the aerial contest although White made the point that they didn’t do it enough. Kick 31 times, he said, and Ireland lose. Fiji kicked 21.

White is a brilliant talker on all things rugby and he gave a fascinating, off-the-cuff summation of how Fiji discommoded Ireland for the first 55 minutes by aping much of what the South Africans will try to do on the same soil sevens day later.

“Well, I think we probably did Ireland a favour today,” he explained. “Let me put it that way because I think Ireland deep down knows that if they play like that against South Africa, they’re going to be up against it.” 

White honed in on a penalty to Fiji on the hour when they chose to tap and go. South Africa, he warned, would have taken the scrum, bet on claiming another penalty and maybe a yellow card with it, and then opted for another. And another if needed.

The Boks, he added, would gobble up the chances Fiji spurned from close-range.

“Please, the headline mustn’t read, ‘Jake says, Boks to smash Ireland.’ That’s not what I'm saying. That’s definitely not what I’m saying. I’m just saying that I know what’s coming, and I think in a lot of ways, Ireland would have seen that.

“Those same situations, in the past coaching South Africa, there’s no way that the captain who’s been here years, Malcolm Marx, is going to say, ‘we’ll take the tap’. Malcolm Marx will say, let’s take the scrum. We’ll kick it out in the corner, and we’ll take the lineout.

“That’s because they back themselves in those situations.” 

Kelleher & Co can’t say they don’t know what’s coming.