In a tournament with no room for a warm-up, where you just hop into the blocks and hope to explode out of them, home games are a mixed blessing. If the getaway isn’t clean then the boost to the away side can be turbo stuff. Which poses a dilemma: how do you catch up without playing catch up?
Ireland’s one word answer might be perseverance. If pushed to expand they might add that when you can sense your opponents losing the plot you have to help them along with that one. Patience is actually better than going bald-headed for the big prize. Nudge the ball in behind them and squeeze some more.
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A bonus-point win was hard to see beforehand, and hard to see when England spent a chunk of time looking like a very good rugby team before switching to something else entirely.
Yes, there were shades of November with the imbalance between time spent about to score and time spent waiting for the conversion, but the story was how good Ireland looked when they got things right. It never looked better than in the last half hour when Dan Sheehan came off the bench. His explosiveness further unsettled the away team who were going through the horrors for much of the second half.
Lots of men in green lodged valuable deposits in the confidence bank. For Sam Prendergast, the focus of so much attention, there was further illustration of the mentality needed to play that position at Test level. After a mixed bag of sweet – some very sweet – and sour, in the second quarter he had his hand up like a rocket to volunteer for a difficult penalty his team needed to take the lead for the first time. If he had been better off the tee with two earlier conversions they would not have been trying to get ahead. Well before the ball cleared the crossbar the assistant refs were raising their flags.
It was a long way from the circuitous route Ireland had taken to get to a winning position. You wouldn’t call it butchery because it wasn’t all rough cuts and bits thrown on the floor. Lads were not spilling the ball on the way to the tryline, waving to the crowd. But the aggregate of near misses in 40 minutes was mounting, emphasised by the 5-10 scoreline. You could class them as forced errors, for England were so good everything Ireland were doing with ball in hand came at a price of high pressure.
So when Josh van der Flier slightly altered his line when running on to a ball, in space, in the England 22, would it have turned out differently if he stayed on autopilot?
If Bundee Aki had tucked the ball under his oxter instead of doing what all coaches demand – carrying it in two hands – would he have survived the pulled arm tackle that saw it spill forwards?
Throw in Tadhg Beirne holding Maro Itoje’s leg when the Ireland lock was on the ground and legally out of the game – that cost Rónan Kelleher a try via the TMO – and James Ryan running a line, close in, that was deemed obstructive.
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That’s a fair old bundle of what- ifs. As we were totting them up and ascribing importance along came James Lowe. Again. His brilliance created the try for Jamison Gibson-Park. Its opening didn’t look like it would have a happy ending: a wide pass to the wing that looked like every other one of those we see so often in the modern game, when the press defence leaves an attacker unmarked out wide, but the problem is in hitting him with a pass that doesn’t spend half the night getting there. It was from this unpromising start that Lowe created the space for his Kiwi mate.
If there was any debate about Lowe’s candidacy for a Test place with the Lions, never mind a place in the squad, this surely killed it.
Garry Ringrose is another with summer on his mind. Having missed the last two tours his last chance is at hand. His defence was that of a driven man. Yes, he fell off an important tackle on Marcus Smith in the Irish 22, but in fairness to the England No 10 he did well to ride it.
On the review Simon Easterby will lead with the good stuff – a good scrum and very good defence – move on to the very good – everything in the second half bar the last 10 minutes – and then replay the missed opportunities.
It will be a very enjoyable week before heading to Edinburgh. Ireland’s balance across the side was very good, and the impact off the bench – when the game was a live issue – was reassuring. How good will they be with a decent start?
