RUGBY IRELAND 17 ARGENTINA 3:EVEN IN victory over Los Pumas, Ireland are rarely swinging from the chandeliers, and so the latest chapter in this bitter saga duly adhered to a dog-eared script.
The one-point win in Adelaide at the 2003 World Cup was too nerve-racking for the Irish players or management to feel anything other than relief, and ditto last Saturday.
A world ranking of eighth and a second-tier seeding at the World Cup draw this day week secured; job done, stick the video in the vault and leave it to gather dust.
Furthermore, as with the Lansdowne Road wins in 2002 and 2004, the bad blood between the two had again been poisoned. As the endgame degenerated into a rash of running feuds, you wanted Bryce Williams to end matters not so much to relieve the tedium as avert the risk of a convoy of ambulances following David Wallace to the hospital. Wallace suffered no more than bad bruising from the accidental collision with Juan Martin Fernandez Lobbe, while the extent of Jerry Flannery's knee injury will be known today.
It's hard not to like the Pumas. Off the pitch they are wonderfully warm and engaging people, eminently helpful in their own sometimes chaotic way, while bringing the same passion to life that they do to rugby. They are generally entitled to the litany of grievances which helps foster their togetherness. Their hatred of losing is obviously part of what makes the Pumas so good but at times they don't do themselves any favours when losing.
Ireland coach Declan Kidney expressed the hope that one of the benefits of this result might be the countries avoid each other for the first time in four World Cups. "That might be a slight relief for everyone involved," he ventured with a knowing smile.
However, results elsewhere having reinforced the dreary hegemony of the Southern Hemisphere over the Northern Hemispher, Argentina remain in fourth place today. Thus, there remains the spectre of Ireland and Argentina renewing, eh, acquaintances again in New Zealand circa 2011.
And, after this putrid affair, spectre is the operative word! Even more so than the players, the new management team could probably have done without the gun to their heads that was the scramble for World Cup seedings.
"Yeah, but that's way outside my control and you could also say it gave us a great focus for the match," reasoned Kidney. "There was something to play for and it put a bit more spice into it. They were playing for top four so there was nothing about experimental matches or anything like that."
Asked what he had learned about his players, Kidney said: "I think there has been a lot of learning. Some things are better kept indoors. We're new management, we learned a lot about each other and the management learned a lot about the players. There's nothing like having time with them.
"We have a good relationship with the provinces now and maybe we can give a little bit of feedback for what things they have to work on but we just have to manage a whole lot of things before we come back together in nine weeks' time."
Kidney was, apparently, a good deal less sanguine about the performance in private than he was in public. That said, he has clearly been taken aback at the low level of confidence and the lingering hangover from the World Cup misadventure.
"It surprised me because they have won three Triple Crowns but we just seem to knock that fact. So they should be full of confidence, but they're not. Today, 17-3 isn't so bad. I know it didn't get the blood going but I'd say if you were out there you would have had the blood flowing.
"If we could just get that balance right and be reasonably critical but then not over-the-top hysterical when we win a match then I think that, going forward, it would be better if everybody keeps in step. Your effect on the team is absolutely enormous. We're no different to what we were 10 years ago; we're a small country, we could achieve great things, we shouldn't get too high when we win and go too far down when we lose."
Rob Kearney concurred: "When was the last time we beat a team ranked ahead of us? And because we did do so poorly last week there was a lot of pressure on, and it would have been easy to go into the box. Maybe we did do that in terms of playing field position and going back to the basics, but simple rugby is what we had to do."
As for Ronan O'Gara's much-debated comments in midweek? "I didn't pay too much attention to it. Rog always speaks his mind and it's nothing we haven't heard before. I suppose everybody was probably thinking it and he just blurted it out," said Kearney, smiling.
And there was room for O'Gara's honesty. "Honesty is crucial. It's like any relationship, if it's with your wife or your team-mates, you need honesty and for a team to develop you have to have that level of honesty among everybody."
With both sides fearful of letting the other push their noses in front, Argentina won the toss and elected to kick off, and after the interval Ireland's strategy was clearly to play a risk-free, territorial game and take whatever three-point opportunities were on offer.
This was assisted in equal measure by the Pumas' collective loss of discipline and composure, and by the officials, amid signs confirmed later, of more sledging than in an Australian Test match.
"Yeah, it was tough, it was physical," smiled Kearney again. "They're angry little Argies really, but nothing we didn't expect from them. I couldn't understand half the stuff they were saying; some in Spanish and some in English, but it wasn't too nice whatever they were trying to get at."
Santiago Phelan deserved credit for highlighting the Pumas' costly lack of discipline but Fernandez Lobbe began to sound, as well as look like, a spaghetti-western gunslinger. "There's some players that like to talk too much. For us it's rugby, but we're going to play Ireland again, and it's going to be again physical and very aggressive. We both play 110 per cent. But don't worry, it was a tough game, they beat us this time, but there's going to be revenge."
Cue the pool allocation in London this day week, when Ireland might prefer to draw the All Blacks.
