DECLAN KIDNEY straddled two worlds of thought after the match. The Irish coach knew Ireland had ramped up their performance, gave the All Black cage a decent rattling in the first half and played their way back into the embrace of public affection. But it didn’t remove the sting of the scoreline and a 20-point defeat.
Bitter sweet; bloodied but unbowed; glorious defeat. Pick any cliché that comes to hand to describe a pulsating, high-tempo match. The result tempered any show of declamatory joy but Kidney yesterday spoke with the tone of a coach who believed things had started to turn Ireland’s way. The path he had been speaking about for the past three weeks, that he had been asking people to believe in, finally became more visible. But the competitive side of his mind, the hemisphere that deals with dispassionate reasoning, knew such a margin was also a pretty comprehensive hiding.
Kidney was in no mood to massage the team’s collective feeling of well-being. A Test later this week against Argentina could be the making or breaking of this autumn series. Ireland challenge Argentina with expectations again raised and knowing too that against a team more equal to their standing in the world, judgment will be harsher.
Kidney was encouraged but kept himself and his players on a tight emotional leash. “I suppose it would give encouragement,” he said cautiously. “But I think too much of them just to let them away with that. Then we go into the old things like ‘it was a great performance’. We’re too good a country to buy into that.
“We need to work on things ourselves. I don’t want to sound like a broken record. It’s in our own control, if you look at the turnovers, just getting a few simple things right. We put our defence under a lot of pressure. You guys probably know the stats better than I do. Was it 70-30 possession? We need to make it 50-50.”
Perhaps after a tiresome week of duplicity and disingenuity from the political ranks, the coach was content to be transparent. Kidney chose not to hide behind suggestions that learning from such a high octane experience could in some way enrich the team in the longer term.
“I don’t want to be hiding behind long-term development. People who paid came in to see us win today and that’s what we tried to do,” he said.
“And we will never, ever pick out a team with the view ‘well that’s developmental’ because that’s only hiding behind it.
“People paid their hard-earned money to come and watch us. I’ve never put out a team with the view ‘well, that’s a developmental side’.
“Every team I put out I believe they are good enough to win. You need development within that winning-type culture as well. We want to try to do two things at the one time.”
With the injury list stacking up, next week’s team will be different. Because it is the last in the series, the impression Ireland leave in Aviva before next year’s Six Nations begins will carry to February. Still, it’s the whiff of promise more than sapping defeat that lingers. A performance and a result appear to be the next step.
“We need to get back to winning ways again next week against Argentina, which will present a much different challenge to the one we faced today and last week,” explained Kidney. “That’s the benefit of this series. It’s brilliant to have a four-game series in that we want to learn more about ourselves. But you want to be winning games in the present, you don’t want to be building for the future all the time, you want to be winning matches now and then have one per cent of an eye on next year as well.
“We are learning as we go along. We’ve been four weeks in camp. We’ve another week to go. It’s a different lifestyle and you have to have strength of mind to stay with that. Sometimes they’re not playing every week but they can get called upon and the only way you find out the strength of your squad is by experiencing it and that’s what all of the lads are doing at the moment.”
