Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

I was referring to the England v Ireland rugby match on Saturday.

Ireland weren't very poor for most of the match, I completely disagree. Our scrum was very poor or at least judged to be by the ref.

Bonus point record win at Twickenham, "very poor". We've lost the plot.

The current squad on the Leinster website doesn't include Joe McCarthy, incredible, what a promotion to the Irish squad !!!

Makes one wonder what Joe Schmidt saw in Jean Klein . . . . .

Ah McCarthy is there because they need another body for training and he's close by on short notice. Wouldn't be getting carried away. Looks a good prospect for Leinster though.

The bonus point win does not mean it was a good performance by Ireland throughout the whole match. Ireland played well for a short while at the start and again in the last 10 minutes. Otherwise, England were dominant.

We were destroyed in the scrum and at the breakdown - conceding 17 turnovers and 15 penalties.

We are definitely a great team to watch. Some of our attacking play was glorious. However, much of it was also panicked, wasteful and error strewn. The very best teams will still beat us unless we maintain composure even when we are favourites to win.

I actually backed him at 40/1 to go on the Lions tour at the start of last season. The season he is having this year, I expected him to have it last year. He may have and all if he wasn't injured.

Their heroism nonsense shows how much they've fallen, I don't think they expected to win that game at all. I'm not sure why they feel so optimistic after that game.

Rewatched the game and kept an eye on England this time. The just didn't play well on Saturday. The thing that struck me most is how inaccurate they were and how little ambition they really have in attack. They tried going through the hands in the first half to limited success. Their passing was just off all day. They constantly had to check their runs before receiving the ball.

In the second half they abandoned their running game and seemed to focus entirely on a pressure game. It's an effective tactic when it's done right. Rain high balls on a back three and force them into mistakes. But it worked just twice. Once when Keenan fielded it but our sweepers where slow to the clear out. The second time Keenan fielded another but knocked on in the subsequent tackle.

We can't underestimate just how much energy a team can get from a dominant scrum and when they win the little battles like that turnover pen and knock on. It has a very positive psychological effect. But once England's energy levels dipped it was obvious that they had no effective attacking game plan other than scrummaging and looking for three points. They're wasting talents like Marcus Smith if this is all that they're asking him to do.

Yeah the ITV commentators (and Nick Mullins is one of the best around in fairness) narrative of plucky England has seemingly taken hold.

Sure it was a bit closer than we'd have liked at the 60 minute mark, but we beat them comprehensively.

Any sort of decent performance next week and we win the Triple Crown, I know some can be sniffy about that, but we've only won 11 of them since 1883 so another one would be nice.

It was very close - we never remotely looked like scoring 50 points.

That’s why there is a small clique in here and hardly anyone else anymore.

its a forum for debate and discussion lads. Not just an echo chamber.

Ireland played well for most of the game. We forced a few passes in scoring positions, but it still required good work to get into those positions. Englands defence was good, as was their tactical kicking. But beyond that they didn’t offer a whole lot in open play. We probably left 2-3 tries out there on the day. That wasn’t a game that England should have won. It was a game we should have won by more. The stats bear that out.

So do you want to expand on that, what does your version of a learning curve look like and why is it different to the one below?

Below is what the common understanding of learning curve is, when people talk about steep learning curves etc, this is what they mean:

https://www.valamis.com/hub/learning-curve

“The learning curve theory proposes that a learner’s efficiency in a task improves over time the more the learner performs the task.”

Also a slightly more complicated graph involving a slow start before rising:

“The bottom of the curve indicates slow learning as the learner works to master the skills required and takes more time to do so.

The latter half of the curve indicates that the learner now takes less time to complete the task as they have become proficient in the skills required.”

For the middle 40 minutes, it was somewhat the perfect storm in England's favour. They had a "backs to the wall", plucky underdog mentality from the red card, which English teams are always very dangerous with. They had dominance in the scrum, which gave them massive emotional energy, field position and points. It also brought the Twickenham crowd into the game, which is a huge factor. That was compounded by us giving away many stupid penalties and being very inaccurate in attack, which led to more scrums, which led to England getting more and more access into the game and pulling it back to 15 all when we should have been out of sight.

The Doris disallowed try was a massive moment in the game. Had that try stood, I think we would have been out of sight and we probably would have racked up a score. But a knock on was given, and England won a scrum penalty which gave them a massive emotional lift and it allowed them into the game.

For a lot of the game, I don't think we played well at all. We were sloppy in possession and gave away stupid penalties. And it was our better players like Beirne, Furlong, Sexton and Henderson making the mistakes too. But I think we did magnificently well to weather the English onslaught (which we largely brought on ourselves) in their backyard and keep our composure and put them to bed. You could clearly see the entire England team and their crowd growing in confidence and belief in the 2nd half. That's a very difficult thing to overcome, but we did.

I think England's decision to go into the air so much as they did was probably the right one given that we were coughing up a penalty at every scrum. Thankfully Keenan did a really great job of fielding under pressure with minimal knock-ons. That being said, I don't think they could have put it through the hands even if they wanted to.