Peg Leg wrote: ↑March 21st, 2022, 4:35 pm
Ruckedtobits wrote: ↑March 21st, 2022, 8:30 am
neiliog93 wrote: ↑March 20th, 2022, 7:54 pm
Pretty mediocre Six Nations from Ireland. No good teams in the tournament except France. We were lucky with the red card against England, struggled to put away a terrible Scotland, and should have put 50 point on an abject Wales.
Very harsh commentary on a team playing high-tempo, high-skill rugby. We did lots of things very well consistently and it's much more difficult to hide weaknesses in the style we play.
Yes, mistakes occurred and sometimes in simple areas like passing and catching but that can happen to any team even NZ. the6N is an attritional tournament and we maintained our form throughout the competition, although arguably our best performance was our first against Wales.
I don't accept it was a mediocre performance from Ireland. We imposed our style on every team, even France, not for every moment, not in every facet, but we never reverted to box kicks or pick & jam rugby because of the defences presented against us.
Inclined to agree here and would suggest that it's more a case of the teams adapting to Irelands game and nullifying some of the options we had available to us in November. e.g. Fickou aggressively shooting out up to cut off two passing options for whoever was the play maker and forcing back in to a busy midfield.
Absolutely. What do people think, that just because we have a new attacking shape our opponents are going to wave us through?
France, as Peg Leg says, put a shooter up to keep us funnelled inside. They tried to pull the carrier down towards them to isolate him from the ruck support.
England, albeit having to adapt to having 14, put Slade at the 10 slot a lot in defence with Smith out on the wing and used territory game and their pack to limit our visits into the 22.
Scotland, without the pack strength of the other two, went for double and triple tackles to prevent the offload/pass. It was very risky, as if you can pass around it you should have numbers, but it worked very well - especially with us playing Aki at 12.
I know there were unforced errors too, but that's going to happen with how we play and the tempo we use. Not long ago, at the top level you might only get one or two clear line break opportunities a game. With the rule changes and the tactics we use, Ireland are creating multiple clean breaks a game. Not every clean break has a realistic chance of becoming a try but the fact we're scoring so many is proof - if it was needed - that the tactics (errors and all) are working.
Porter, Kelleher and Ryan are all pretty key options in our attacking shape. The replacements all have their own positive attacking profiles, but they don't fit into the system the same way as the others. As the squad grows and has more camps, the number of players who can come in and play the various system roles will expand and we're less likely to miss the key guys so much.
But defences are already showing that there are answers to the questions we ask. There is no perfect system and no squad that can execute it perfectly. That's just being churlishly unrealistic.
The best team performances came from Ireland. I don't think there's even a debate about that. France were actually quite bad for decent stretches of every game they played. They're getting eulogies for how they're back to playing "the beautiful game" but in reality it's a few bits of magic per game from their two world class backs, in between swathes of good solid play and some fairly poor passages. They're just lucky to have some global star level players and an elite coaching setup who gives them solidity.
We don't have global stars, but we do play the best team game.
