“Rugby is about inches and sometimes it doesn’t go for you.”
Kieran Crowley’s words after Italy’s gutsy and for a time entertaining and effective performance in defeat to Ireland carried an added resonance and just a whiff of regret, entirely justified in appraising the contest.
The Italian coach might have been talking about the physical properties, but he could just as easily have been referring to the ‘top two inches’ so beloved of sportspeople as the most important faculty in being able to successfully execute under pressure.
Trailing 27-20 and backed by momentum, Italy once again swept into the Ireland 22, changing the point of attack twice before working the ball into the midfield. What Italian centre Juan Ignacio Brex was thinking when he elected to go for a low percentage high-risk crosskick on the fly for his secondrow colleague Niccolò Cannone languishing on the touchline, is not public knowledge.
[ Patchy Ireland pull through in Rome as Italy provide stern test of credentialsOpens in new window ]
Brex overcooked the kick, perhaps because the synapses overheated in that instant, the decision to put boot on ball arguably more so than the execution, beggared belief, one of those moments that he’d love to redo; or at least he should.
That kick was a matter of inches, not in terms of the ball bouncing in touch and goal and over the touchline but those ‘two top’ inches that encouraged the decision. Italy weren’t guaranteed to score in that instant but they had their opponents stretched to breaking point. The Italian centre backed himself to execute, and Crowley is unlikely to upbraid Brex.
It was, though, a pivotal moment in the game. Ireland’s facility to have tries chalked off, correctly, for some handling glitches meant that they hadn’t managed to distance themselves sufficiently on the scoreboard.
A try for Italy at that point with a conversion to come might have been the tipping point in the contest; it would certainly have guaranteed a fraught end game for those wearing green jerseys on the pitch and in the stands.
[ Italy 20 Ireland 34: As it happenedOpens in new window ]
The kick was also incongruous with the way that Italian had attacked for most of the afternoon at the Stadio Olimpico. They zeroed in Ireland’s fledgling midfield partnership of Stuart McCloskey and Bundee Aki, who lost their shape and cohesion in the first half when Italy made a handful of linebreaks.
The visitors missed 20 tackles in the opening 40 minutes – they recalibrated the system at half-time as it only stretched to 27 by the game’s end. It wasn’t just McCloskey and Aki that were struggling to track the blue shirts, James Lowe was impetuous on several occasions, one of which paid off handsomely, but a couple of others did not. Ross Byrne, too, found himself detached within the system.
It makes if therefore more surprising that Italy, who cut Ireland up in midfield and regularly got to the edges with men and momentum, decided to veer away from what had been so successful and instead opt for a kick. The relief from an Irish perspective in that moment was almost palpable.
There was always going to be a level of disconnect when trying to wire in a new halfback and midfield partnership to the defence system, but it was trickier that many would have anticipated. It offered a timely reminder of just how well the injured Garry Ringrose hustles in defence while wearing the 13 jersey.
It’s not fair to compare Aki to Ringrose given how little the former plays outside centre and the fact that he was stepping into a Test match against an Italian team that is making tremendous progress in their attacking game.
Ireland will just be grateful that in that isolated moment for Brex it didn’t have a happy outcome; a pivotal moment when luck smiled on Ireland.
