The title is well and truly gone now after a two-score defeat to England leaves Eddie Jones with a title showdown against Wales. Instead, Ireland are left scrabbling in the lower half of the table with nothing but third or fourth to aim for but nonetheless they need wins at home to Italy and Scotland now to salvage redemption from this Six Nations.
After four games without a win, they need two wins for themselves, all the more so with a three-Test tour to South Africa and three more with the All Blacks and Australia later in the year. They need it for their own dented self-belief and that of their supporters, although one senses there is enough goodwill in the bank for the public to stay with them.
"If they have watched the last three games, hopefully they've seen enough to show that we haven't had a massive amount of luck," ventured Joe Schmidt in the aftermath of Saturday's 21-10 defeat at Twickenham.
"I wouldn't default to Sir Alex Ferguson all the time but even he said you've got to have a bit of luck. There's a couple of calls that have frustrated us, sometimes you get that and a bit of a leg up from that, you gain some confidence and you get a little bit of momentum. At the same time you've got to earn that so at the same time we've got to try earn that."
Positive support
“We are always overwhelmed by the positive support that we do get and we feel a massive responsibility to repay that support by putting on the performance that is to the very best of our ability. I can only say that we’re working towards that.”
Schmidt found it hard to contend with Eddie Jones’s post-match assertion that as the younger side, with less experience, England had more growth for improvement. Yet there had to be growth in this Ireland team too “because you can’t lose Test matches and you can’t put yourself in the picture, get ahead in the second half with 30 minutes to go, then give up two tries and then not convert the chances that you have to score”.
“At the end, we felt a bit unlucky that Josh [van der Flier] wasn’t awarded a try but then we didn’t do well enough at the scrum subsequent to that. There’s things we’ve got to get better at, there’s got to be room for growth because. If there’s not it’s going to be a very bad habit that we don’t want to be part of.”
This has been a campaign of increasing ‘almosts’ and ‘nearlys’, after a superb opening half-hour against Wales and a worthy draw, to a strong if unrewarding first half-hour against France, and a strong if unrewarding final quarter on Saturday after withstanding a first-half pummelling.
“But we’re not quite getting the result, therefore you start to question what you’re doing a little bit,” admitted Schmidt. “Any hesitation at this level is a recipe for disaster. We’ve got to maintain our confidence, keep our heads up, roll our sleeves up and go again.”
Injury toll
What with the six-day turnaround between Wales and France, the ensuing injury toll, it hasn’t been “smooth sailing” Schmidt also admitted, “and it wasn’t again today but I think that builds a bit of character.
“I certainly hope so because the one thing I wouldn’t question about the players is their character. They demonstrated that today . . .”
Ireland will review their failure to convert more line breaks and chances into scores, and seek to make their set-pieces "as watertight as possible", which they certainly weren't on Saturday. "We'll keep working on the combinations that were new today," he added, suggesting the Stuart McCloskey-Robbie Henshaw midfield combination may be retained.
As for the unpleasant sideshow regarding Johnny Sexton’s which Jones fuelled with his tasteless comments, the Australian’s petulant reaction to valid questions as to whether he regretted bringing the player’s parents into the mix suggest he may well have been spoken to privately. Certainly IRFU committee members made their anger known to their RFU counterparts when the latter hosted Friday’s pre-match dinner.
“He’s not distracted by those sort of comments,” said Schmidt in maintaining they would not have given Sexton added motivation, “and it’s just not something we do. We just try to look after ourselves and try to commit to the rugby values we believe in and forge ahead like that.
Committed
“We’re pretty committed to sticking to that and we’ll roll our sleeves up and try and work our way into those last two games and again try to combine the character and enterprise we showed today with a little bit more experience and know-how and hopefully that can be sufficient to get a result.”
Maintaining the high moral ground, which wouldn’t be difficult, Schmidt also declined to suggest Jones’s comments were ethically against the spirit of the game.
“I think it’s a personal choice. I don’t preach ethics to other people and I think you just have your own way of doing things. The one thing I’d say is that we’re always going to get penalised at times but we try to commit to be as lawful as we can in the various aspects of the game.”
At times though, you’d like to see them fight fire with fire.
Conor Murray received about six stitches to a nasty-looking gash resulting from a kick to the head by England fullback Mike Brown, and did not return to the game.
Schmidt declined to venture an opinion on the officials’ verdict that Brown’s kick, his third attempt at the ball, was “accidental”. “I’m not going to chase those things. They’re decisions that officials make and they make them under pressure and they have other people look at things,” he said.
