Having watched the game in Sinnotts with a few beers, the wife and I headed over to Eddie Rockets on South Anne St to chase the hunger away.
As I stood in line to pay our bill, someone who just walked in the door spied my Ireland jersey and asked “Hey, who won the game?”
Normally I hate it when people assume by my American accent that I know nothing about rugby, but I honestly think this guy did fall into that category.
Even so, when I related to him that the final score had been 17-3 to Ireland, I couldn’t stop myself from adding this…
“The score doesn’t reflect how the game went at all. It was brutal.”
I’m sure he took the word brutal totally the wrong way, and I’m sure he didn’t really want a post-game analysis, but I just couldn’t let the final score come out of my gob without clarification.
It really, really WAS a brutal match.
But if you want to see the glass as half full, then you can say we got the job done, ensuring that we kept our eighth-placed ranking which gives us seeding for the World Cup.
That’s all well and good, but this performance left some lingering questions in the air…
(1) Would we have won if Argentina had Hernandez and Contepomi on the park?
(2) Have we seen a significant improvement in this squad since the darkest times of the O’Sullivan era?
(3) Can we feel confident now looking forward to the Six Nations?
Well I’m sorry if this makes me a doom and gloom merchant, but I have to answer “no” to all of the above questions.
Maybe George had it right analysing the Canada match after all.
And as for Tony Ward giving man-of-the-match to RO’G well that must have been an Out-Halfs Union sympathy vote, since not one player from numbers 9 to 15 played to their capacity on the day.
The frustrating thing is, we have all seen world class performances from every individual in the backline this season, but only with their clubs.
This is the essence of Declan Kidney’s role. Tactics, formations and strategies will look after themselves, but in my book it’s down to him to get these players casting aside their provincial differences and playing for the green jersey.
And in the two matches that mattered in this series, I have yet to see it happening, so he has a lot of work to do between now and the French visit to Croker in February.
