Whether Ireland will be able turn things around before they face an Italy side high on confidence after winning their first match against Scotland is a moot point, says Ronan O’Gara.
The mood after the Stade de France defeat was downbeat and the challenge for Ireland coach Andy Farrell is to reset his group of players.
O’Gara acutely knows how difficult that can be as it hasn’t always been smooth for the former Irish outhalf as coach of La Rochelle after initial success with the club. They are currently 10th in the Top 14 table.
“It’s not easy to do because one of the most underappreciated ingredients in sport is confidence,” said O’Gara, speaking at a promotion event for his Biggs and ROG ‘On The Fly’ live shows with former Wales outhalf Dan Biggar in Dublin and Cork.
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“The narrative now around Ireland is negative. It’s difficult – it’s an ageing team, they’re out of form and people will always give their opinion and they’re fully entitled to give their opinion like.
“But not alone are you battling what you can control, you’re trying to battle what you can’t control. And it becomes nearly a vicious trap of eating away at your mental reserves, that by game day you don’t have as much energy as you’d like to have for giving everything you can on the weekend.”
O’Gara also pointed out that people need to understand that Ireland’s depth chart is not the same as that of France or England.
It’s something Farrell can do little about and while O’Gara was far from offering it as an excuse, when Ireland shed players it impacts more dramatically than with the bigger nations.
“People have to understand that it really affects Ireland or Wales and Italy, the smaller countries, when you take out, shall we say, six definite starters from that team,” he said. “It’s a different team and that’s why you appreciate big-game players.
“If there’s no [Hugo] Keenan, there’s no [James] Lowe, there’s not a [Bundee] Aki, a [Robbie] Henshaw, a [Andrew] Porter, there’s not a [Tadhg] Furlong, there’s not a Ryan Baird. It’s a different team and it’s not their best 15 or 23.
“When you’ve four professional teams your pick is so much lower than the 30 professional teams like France have. So, France’s strength in depth is scary and you look at [Thibaud] Flament and [Paul] Boudehent coming back in for this weekend and contesting the guys like [Mickaël] Guillard and [Charles] Ollivon and how well they played.”
Nonetheless, the low-energy Irish performance did not get a free pass, with O’Gara distinguishing between personal and team standards. There was a low point in the match where Ireland were looking like they might take a 50-point beating.
While the team, ably driven by a lively and potent bench, turned the match away from a more glaringly bad scoreline, Ireland were second best in too many areas of the pitch.
“France won the scraps and they won the high ball,” said O’Gara. “They won the breaking ball and they were, particularly for the first hour, probably a second quicker than Ireland in everything – in their speed of thought, in their speed of movement and also in how they moved the point of contact and had nearly a free rein in the game.”
O’Gara also saw how France have begun to move away from the more traditional thinking and are leading the field in the development of hybrid players.
“That try Ollivon scored. If you look at what he did, there’s probably five players in the world that scored that try,” he said. “It was an amazing finish. So, they’re playing athletes in the secondrow, while before it was a different breed of secondrow playing.
“Now you kind of have five backrows that are playing, two in the secondrow and three in the backrow. So, their handling, with seven other backs, is really, really good.”
