LUKE McLEAN, Italy’s Australian-born fullback, is one man who most definitely does not look forward to Ronan O’Gara’s return. Speaking to The Irish Times at the Rome training centre of La Borghesiana, McLean admitted O’Gara can be a major headache for a fullback.
“When he kicks the ball, especially if it is a torpedo, then it doesn’t have much hang-time, so you’ve really got to make sure that your positional play is the best it can be.”
O’Gara, of course, is only one of a number of problems Italy face at Croke Park. After all, they come into this year’s Six Nations after a disastrous 2009 when they picked up yet another wooden spoon, losing all five games and incurring painful drubbings along the way – 9-38 against Ireland and 8-50 against France, both in Rome.
Yet 22-year-old, 10-time capped McLean is looking on the bright side. Like just about everyone else in the Italian rugby movement, he hopes last autumn’s 24-6 win over Samoa in Ascoli might just represent the classic turning point.
After all, Italy came into that game on the back of a miserable run of 13 losses: “We had a tough Six Nations last season, and then games against South Africa, Australia and the All Blacks. We were playing the best teams in the world and it was hard to get a result, but we always felt that we were getting closer and closer, we weren’t losing by 40 points but we were making it much tighter.
“And then we did well against New Zealand at the San Siro (20-6 last November), so we knew we were getting there.
“It (the Samoa win) was the change in mindset that we needed, the change from keeping things down to a low score against us as opposed to actually winning. We know that if we do play good rugby against the teams that aren’t first and second in the world, well then we can win.”
Or that is what he has got to believe. McLean has been in Italy for more than two years, having moved here on the suggestion of various professionals back home and on the recommendation of compatriot Luke Doherty. The climate is good, the food is good and the rugby is not bad either, so come on over, said Doherty. Clearly, it helped that even if his surname suggests he should be playing for Scotland, his maternal grandparents were emigrants from Lombardy and Tuscany.
The problem, of course, is that when it comes to the Six Nations tournament, Italian limitations seem to be regularly exposed.
McLean, who scored all of Italy’s nine points against Ireland last year, curiously takes some encouragement from that: “I take confidence out of that game, obviously in the first half we were there or thereabouts, but then Ireland scored just on half-time and after that, it was really in the last 10 to 15 minutes that Ireland ran away with it, with a couple of quick tries. Once you let Ireland get a bit of a roll on, they’re very hard to stop and that’s something we’ll have to concentrate on, trying not to let them have a 10-minute period where they can run riot.”
He said it.
