If Ireland could take the dominant red card 20-minute phase early in the first half and marry it with the disappointing final 20 minutes at the end of the second half, the score might have looked a little more even than 26-13 to the All Blacks last Saturday.
Chicago offered the two sides of New Zealand, as well as the good and bad of Ireland, with the three tries in the last quarter representing the kind of sting in the tail that Ireland has managed to avoid over the last number of years.
“It’s just very difficult to wrestle back to momentum,” said Rónan Kelleher, back with the team in Dublin ahead of Saturday’s game against Japan at the Aviva Stadium.
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“We didn’t get those dead stops. That’s important, especially at this level. You have to get your two-man shots in, you have to stop their momentum, you have to create a bit of time in that tackle.
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“You can’t let them have that lightning quick ball that they want, because then they’re all of a sudden playing on top you. We just didn’t do that in the last 20 minutes.”
After the match, head coach Andy Farrell pointed to mental lapses and mental sharpness, with which Kelleher concurred.
The reasons for the general malaise were not all that clear, but what was evident was that individual players were not executing their game plan in open play or in the set piece.
A mosaic of patterns and skills, the lineout needed emergency care. Kelleher, a replacement for captain Dan Sheehan, suggested the moving parts were mistimed and shifting at different speeds.
“The lineout has multiple components that go into it,” said the hooker.
“It’s a lot of moving pieces. But I think just from us, we just need to go back to nailing our individual drill as players. I thought we had a good plan in place, we had good calling options, but at times maybe a bit of our drill let us down.
“At times it was good. I thought we navigated that red-card period quite well, but obviously ultimately in the end it wasn’t what we wanted.”
Three days on from the defeat and there are few concrete reason as to why the team as a unit malfunctioned or why so many Ireland players allowed New Zealand to sweep over them in the closing period.
Drills, execution, mental fatigue, or maybe the exertion of playing with a man down after Tadhg Beirne was sent off in the third minute which was apparent in the final phase of the match.
Perhaps beating New Zealand 10-7 for a quarter while Beirne was in the bin, waiting for a red card to be called, took its toll and came around to bite the team hard at the end.
“I don’t know,” said Kelleher, “because to be fair, I think the lads managed that red-card period really well. And I think there was also a lot of stop-starts in that first half of the game. So, the lads managed that unbelievably well.
“In that last 20 minutes, it did feel like there was a lot of ball in play. They were playing a lot with penalty advantage, which made it even more tough for us, because we were defending for large periods of time. Then it obviously was just there putting pressure on pressure on us.
“So, I’m not sure if the red card had much of a factor in that last 20 minutes, just because I thought the lads navigated that period well.”
The game against Japan on Saturday is a chance to iron out wrinkles. That or it’s time to get concerned.
