10 Reasons why we failed

is_that_so

Well this RTE chap seems to have all the answers. I agree with a few of them and picked out my own choices from his top 10. The full list.

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RWC: Top 10 Reasons Ireland Flopped

by Brendan Cole

1: Team Selection: 'Untouchables' vs 'Unusables'
2: Eddie O'Sullivan: 'How Dare He Ruin Our Holiday!'
3: Out-half Problem: 'It's a 10 Thing'
5: Wrong Back Row Balance
6: Fitness and Conditioning Failure
7: Tactical Failure: Ireland Got Figured Out
8: Just Not Good Enough

MooseJam

just not good enough I think is the main reason

dc69

MooseJam wrote:

just not good enough I think is the main reason

I dont know about that!we have probably one of the most complete back lines in the competition,becuase our fowards are of lower calabre we need to use a different gameplan than other teams,who have better equiped fowards,and we didnt(thanks eddie!)

obviously some players were having a horrible time.darce and ogara but i do feel if our players were on form we could beat any team on a given day.also the quick ball the backs needed was never given(in the early stages at least),so i think the fowards should take more resposability for our failing in the world cup than they are presently,it seems as if they arent getting near as much stick.
redden did his best but you can only do so much with ****.

also the players coming back from injury horgan ,i cant remeber if odriscoll played the first,wouldnt have been filled with confidence due to the other making a sham of the first few.

all in all a disaster,hopefully we can come back and mount a good 6 nations challnge,people are saying about some of our younger players being brought in,and while they are being blooded in we will lose alot more matches.i dont think this is true,paddy walace and johny sexton(we need a replacement for ogara!),kearney(rob) and fitzgerald and a few more maybe healy,ferris.if they were introduced in small quantities,would add to the squad,not detract from it,so maybe we can look foward to eddie blooding in some youngsters while competing for the 6 nations,not using the young players as an excuse,its possible!

Snickers Man

I would put tactical failure much higher than RTE did. I think we got figured out, hardly surprisingly, and the crucial thing is we weren't able to react to it.

So I guess that cuts across a couple of other things like poor decision making from the guy who's supposed to do that (O'Gara), poor management (O'Sullivan) and just plain not good enough.

The Irish game is based around attacking from set pieces, in particular the line out, using pre arranged ploys with our extremely talented backline. The Georgians figured this out very simply and just refused to let us have any lineouts in their half. They just booted the ball downfiled to our back three, who simply booted it back again, mightily miffed that the Georgians had "missed touch".

The ARgentinians did exactly the same thing. Matt Williams had figured this out after the Georgian game and said so. The guy with the annoying Ulster accent spotted it on Setanta and said so. (The muppet on TV3 kept tut tutting that the Argentinians were "missing touch again") Eddie clearly hadn't copped on either, and had clearly offered no guidance on how to alter the response to that tactic.

O'Gara kicks into space. Hernandez the boot gathers and boots it back down field, deliberately missing touch. Nobody pressurises him. The Irish forwards are conserving their energy for the lineout that they know is coming. The Irish back three is waiting for the kick.

Hickie or Murphy gathers the ball deep and pings it back down saying, "Please try again Senor Hernandes, and this time please put the ball into touch so we can have an attacking lineout!"

Hernandez says "Lineouts? We don't need no steenking lineouts" and boots the ball back down again. Finally Murphy gets frustrated and, with the Argentinian pack bearing down on him tries to chip and chase. He does this twice and twice is obstructed, so subtly that Honiss lets the Argentinians away with it. From one of these events they hare downfield and the understrength Irish cover is penalised for not releasing. Contepomi kicks the points after first of all exchanging pleasantries with his Munster mates.

That is what Argentina did all evening. IF the Irish tried to run it back, they were totally outnumbered in the contact area because the pack were not expecting such a counter attack. They were waiting around with growing indignation for the lineout that the Argentinians just plain refused to give them.

Dumb.

Remember the days when Anthony Foley used to lie deep to gather such kicks? Why wasn't something like that tried? Get Neil Best or even Donncha, or anybody big and heavy to take the ball and set up the counter. And instead of the forwards fannying around waiting for the Argies to please fall in with our hairy old game plan which has been around so long that anyone could read it even if it was written in Irish and in Gaelic script, they should have been ready to double back and assist in the forward drive.

But this wasn't done. It was left to the lightweights Hickie and Murphy to take on the beefy Argentinian pack and they got minced. The Irish forwards who just weren;t there then get the blame for "losing the collisions".

If there was nobody on the field with the tactical nous to spot that, then we should get somebody like that and make them captain. If O'Sullivan had issued a diktat on how to handle deep kicks and refused to allow deviations from it then we need to get rid of him.

Just how right the Georgians and Argentinians were can be seen from the few attacking lineouts we did get. From two of them v Argentina, we scored well worked tries. The Argentinian defence, much lauded, was ransacked. It shows what we could do once we had the platform. The fact that we expected the Argentinians to present us with that platform and ran around like headless chickens when they declined to do so is just arrogance of the worst kind.

Treasure Geordan Murphy's try against Argentina. It was typical of this side. But I fear it was also its swan song. A thing of beauty before dying.

redmca

Snickers Man,

That is the most coherent summing up of our poor tactics I have read to date.

marco_polo

redmca wrote:

Snickers Man,

That is the most coherent summing up of our poor tactics I have read to date.

+1. Great post.

It was no coincidence that two tries that we scored against Argentina came off probably the only two attacking lineouts (that we managed to win) in the whole tournament. Even at that O'Driscolls try came off a poor lineout that Leamy had to salvage.

Snickers Man

redmca wrote:

Snickers Man,

That is the most coherent summing up of our poor tactics I have read to date.

Thank you. No huge insights on my part though. Like I said, Matt Williams had pointed it out after the Georgia game. "They're just doing to Ireland what Munster have been doing to everybody for years," he said.

Once something's been pointed out to you, it looks so obvious when you see it happening again.

Diamondmaker

Snickers Man wrote:

Hernandez says "Lineouts? We don't need no steenking lineouts" .

our hairy old game plan which has been around so long that anyone could read it even if it was written in Irish and in Gaelic script, they should have been ready to double back and assist in the forward drive.


Just how right the Georgians and Argentinians were can be seen from the few attacking lineouts we did get. From two of them v Argentina, we scored well worked tries.

Treasure Geordan Murphy's try against Argentina. It was typical of this side. But I fear it was also its swan song. A thing of beauty before dying.

Excellent Post SM, I love Hernandez accent !

RugBeir

Yeah great analysis SM.

Could it be therefore that ROG played exactly as he was asked to during the competition - kick to open space and avoid making touch at all cost.

If ROG could confirm this we would have conclusive proof that it was all the managers fault ! LOL

theKramer

Yo Snickers Man.
If EOS ever shows his face on some chat show, U should get tickets for the audience and say all that to him. Give the feckin eejit something to think on.

Why, with one of the best back lines in the world did they insist on kicking it?

The French had a sh** first half against NZ because they kicked the ball and it wasnt working. They however, had the common-sense to change their tactics in the second half.

Why couldnt Ireland do that? Did we not have any other tactic? Were we that badly prepared tactically? Will EOS ever wake up and smell the coffee?? (I know the answer to the last one, and I dont have much hope)

SM has summed it up for the most part but we also looked physically lethargic. We were hitting the contact area and getting driven backwards way more times than I have ever seen any of the current crop of players.


Not only that but our lack of a Plan B was reprehensible as was EOS's failure to introduce the likes of Neil Best when our breakdown area was being annihalated by counter rucking (the kicking was not the only rason our breakdown was being destroyed, we weren;t competing physically) and Best is clearly our best counter rucker.