Rugby News:WHEN IRELAND sustained the record 59-6 defeat to the All Blacks in the second Test in Wellington in 1992, a week after nearly pinching the first in Dunedin, the argument in the post-match RTÉ studios went that Ireland should have never have risked exposing themselves to two back-to-back Tests against the world's best side.
The argument was seriously flawed and, similarly today, Ireland can only improve from playing against the best, not by running from them or only playing them on Ireland’s terms. Even on that fateful A/Development tour to New Zealand in 1997 a host of Ireland internationals emerged, such as David Wallace, David Humphreys, Malcolm O’Kelly, Keivn Maggs and Rob Henderson.
That said, with the World Cup in mind, the lessons for this tour are acutely painful. Coupled with that now is the task or rebuilding morale for both the Maori game and the Test in Brisbane.
“Every day you coach your country is your biggest challenge,” maintained Declan Kidney. “It’s another challenge. You never want to have days like today. You want to get going again, it’s the only thing to do. Nobody ever said this tour was going to be easy, we haven’t tried to come up with any excuses – there’s a plethora of them there if you want to feed into that but I think we’d be letting ourselves down if we did.”
With Friday’s game against a fired-up Maoris side – who beat a New Zealand Barbarians side in an entertaining contest by 37-31 on Saturday – now looming, Kidney reasoned: “We’ve other guys who’ll want a game . . . asking a fella to travel halfway around the world and not give him a game is a bit unfair. We took the opportunity to have a game and everyone knows playing the Maori is the next thing to a Test match.”
As to how Ireland can extract something positive from this tour, the coach admitted: “Defeat is forever. We have to use tonight for positive motivation in the future so that it doesn’t ever happen again. We will take a look at how it did happen, we’ll work to rectify that. Winning the next match would always be a good trick.
“I thought we showed reasonable skills in the second half that we can play that game. Everyone thought we were a bunch of muckers, we showed we’re not a bunch of muckers, in terms of our skill. But the first half is what I keep going back to, because that’s our job, you don’t hide away from that fact, you just put your hands up and say ‘we made a mess of it, we need to learn and learn fast’.”
Graham Henry extolled Ireland’s second-half fightback, and though Richie McCaw nodded in agreement when his coach talked of Ireland’s world-class backs, even that sounded patronising – though it wasn’t meant to. But there were misgivings in the All Black camp about the way their intensity dropped off. “The way we played in the first 30 minutes was fantastic. I’m extremely proud of the boys the way we started the game but obviously a couple of things to work on, especially in the second half when things got a bit loose.”
Nevertheless, amid the plaudits for the plucky Irish, there were the put-downs. While under the heading "Best of British blown away" in the the Sunday News, former New Zealand captain Taine Randel wrote: "There's no other way to put it: the All Blacks sent Britain's best team with an absolute hiding last night."
Somebody buy that man a map.
