NOTHING GAINED, NOTHING WON

I sat down on Sunday morning, switched on the TV and went to the recorded RTE coverage of the Ireland match. Unusually, I was filled with a sense of optimism earlier in the week ahead of a new era for Irish international rugby – a new coach with new ideas promised to be a positive move for Ireland, especially when the coach was as good as Joe Schmidt, a multiple-time trophy winner with Leinster down the road at the RDS.

Sadly by Sunday morning my optimism was gone. The team announcement on Thursday afternoon proved to me what I had worried about ever since Schmidt was announced to be taking the reins at the sinking ship going down in D4: Leinster were being favoured by their former coach. Worryingly, it bore striking resemblances to the Kidney favouritism towards Munster – the exact thing which contributed to his eventual downfall.

Fifteen Leinstermen in a twenty-three man squad was the kicker. They are the best team in Ireland, don’t get me wrong for one moment, but they’re not as good as that side made them out to be. Devin Toner and Mike McCarthy ahead of Dan Tuohy at lock was what really did it for me – Tuohy has been one of the in-form locks in Europe this season, his exclusion is inexcusable, he just had to be there.

So maybe I was watching in the wrong frame of mind. Only just awake and bitter at Schmidt’s team selection, I hit play and watched as George Hook and Shane Horgan yelled at each other in the RTE studio. An entertaining start to the coverage I will admit, although eventually it had to be replaced by something more exciting – the rugby match was what I recorded it for and it’s what I fast forwarded to.

I may as well not have bothered.

For all the hype over Samoa, they offered next to nothing for the eighty minutes. Every so often they’d make a promising break and win a penalty, but that seemed to be the limit to their tactics. Losing Logovi’i Mulipola early on seemed to hit them hard and almost stop them in their tracks, and thus Jack McGrath had a field day in the scrum. For a side ranked seventh in the world rankings – one above Ireland – they played like a side that had met for the first time on Saturday morning.

Quite rightly, Ireland put them to the sword. Spearheaded by the dominant scrum led from the front by the excellent Rory Best once again (who thankfully has appeared to have solved his line-out issues), Ireland carved through the weak as water Samoan defence, and by the middle of the second half when the Samoans were looking forward to their airplane journey home, Ireland were running riot.

Sadly, it couldn’t mean less. Joe Schmidt will have learnt virtually nothing from a cruising victory – for the last thirty minutes of that game it was over as far as a contest went. In several positions he gave a few players a chance, such as young Dave Kearney who impressed off the bench, but against such sub-standard opposition it means nothing. Australia will pose infinitely more questions to Ireland than the islanders did on Saturday.

Therefore, my view of the Autumn Internationals has not changed. I watched the Ireland match as well as the England vs. Argentina match on Saturday afternoon too and quite frankly I still fail to grasp the reasoning behind staging them every November. In my opinion the sole reason is to satisfy the fans’ need for international rugby at more than an annual period during the season – there are very few other purposes that these games serve.

So I switched off the match on Sunday morning and sat back and reflected on a game which I wouldn’t watch again if you paid me. It makes me wonder how prepared Ireland really are for these Autumn Internationals – one win over an under strength Samoa side has simply given them game time and nothing more, it will be a hugely different match come this Saturday against Australia, and I’m worried how Schmidt’s side will cope with the expectations placed on them now.

Australia haven’t hit the heights they were at a few years ago, and with an extremely weak, faltering scrum, Ireland will now be expected to beat them. That said, Australia certainly are not a poor team. They ran England very close and had they had a more sympathetic referee than George Clancy then they may have won that match (or maybe that’s my anti-English bias shining through again).

Put it this way: Ireland should win, but they cannot let their performance levels drop for one moment. Otherwise we could be in for a long evening.