STEPHEN FERRIS INTERVIEW:THEY WIN together, so they don't fall alone. Ireland were more than occasionally flawed and if the players felt anything after Scotland's leap towards some sort of Six Nations salvation it was the disconcerting view that they lost a Triple Crown failing in many of the aspects of the game that are normally their strengths.
As inseparable after Saturday’s unscripted finish as they were when celebrating a Grand Slam in the Millennium Stadium last season, the team must now live with an average championship and a poor finish until a summer tour kicks into to revive flagging spirits and savaged pride.
Flanker Stephen Ferris speaks with a sort of wounded honesty. That’s the character of his ferocious game, one that in Croke Park was too tame and sporadic for his own liking. Maybe, just maybe, a week of speaking about silver ware, the historic farewell to the stadium and the dismissal of Paris as though it was “a bad day in the office”, some sort of ghostly, inexplicable aberration was still with the team as they barrelled down the tunnel to the pitch for the last time. After Scotland, the mauling by France in St Denis now seems more comprehensible.
“There were a lot of things, a lot of media hype coming into this game,” reflects Ferris struggling to come up with an explanation. “You can’t help but pick up a newspaper and have a read of it in the morning and maybe sometimes you need to distance yourself from that.
“So much hype . . . the last game at Croke Park. You run out and you want to perform. Sometimes trying too hard isn’t the best thing to do. From a personal note, that’s maybe what I tried to do today and it might be the same for a few other people. You run out all guns blazing, the same as in every Test match. But before the game you’re probably thinking about the occasion a bit more than you usually would. Maybe that can impact on your game. Maybe it did on mine slightly. That experience, that’s in the bank now. I’ll learn from this Six Nations.”
For fear of giving away changing room secrets or too personal thoughts that may come back to haunt them players’ vocabulary rarely strays beyond “disappointed” or “very disappointed”.
They don’t inject much emotion for public consumption. But they’ll be tearing themselves up. Paul O’Connell said the team can’t survive giving away penalties in their own half. That was an explicit criticism of himself, Rob Kearney and all those other rash acts that invited Scottish outhalf Dan Parks to collect his third man-of-the-match award of this championship. The team is bothered.
“Yeah, totally it’s a knock back if you get beaten by anybody,” adds Ferris. “Especially at home, where we pride ourselves on where if you’re a few points down you grind out a win, like we ground out that draw with Australia in the autumn. I firmly believe we have the ability; we have the talent in the squad to perform. It’s still a knock back but going forward I think we are in the right place even though we lost today and got beaten by France. We’ve only lost two games over the last 15. We’re not used to losing.
“It didn’t go well for us,” he concedes. “They read us very well. When you do lose it really does get you down, brings your feet back to the ground. We just made too many mistakes. It was a bad day for us. But this is a team that can win trophies and should win trophies.”
