Irish brought back down to earth with a bump - Andy Goode
Maybe we all got a bit carried away on the opening weekend of the season with the sun beating down and a record 50 tries scored. London Irish scored four of those in their victory over Harlequins at Twickenham but have been brought back down to earth with a bump since then.
The Exiles have now lost three on the spin and are conceding five tries and 36 points per game on average as the harsh realities of a long, hard Premiership season start to kick in.
As a promoted team, your goal is to stay in the league and you have to focus on the real basics in order to achieve that. Defence is the ultimate basic and they really need to improve theirs dramatically moving forwards.
If you’re conceding five tries per game, it’s a simple fact that you’re not going to win very many.
Northampton’s attacking game was very fluid at the weekend and they were accurate but there were some very basic individual errors from Irish. Rob Horne is an experienced player but he’s not a giant and he smashed through quite a few players.
They scored a try right at the end to reduce the deficit to 15 points but it was a cakewalk for Saints from the opening 20 minutes and it did look like first-up defence was a major issue for them.
They’ve got players who can cause other teams real problems but when you get promoted you’ve got to tailor your game in order to stay in the Premiership and that means having the solid foundations of a good set piece and defence. Unfortunately, London Irish are struggling with that at the moment.
There was a lot of intensity against Quins to start the season, with Blair Cowan and the back row in particular covering every blade of grass and ending people, but that seems to have completely dropped off.
The intensity can drop off away from home and you can understand that at Exeter, which is the toughest of away games, but Sale couldn’t catch a cold against Newcastle and then put 36 points on Irish the following week.
That defeat at the AJ Bell Stadium is an eye-opening one for them because what away games are you targeting when you look around the Premiership if you can’t target Sale.
Sunday’s result will have been the most worrying though because they will have felt that they should have beaten Northampton in front of their own fans and they got completely turned over.
You can dust yourselves off after an away defeat but it hurts to lose at home and the belief takes a big hit when you get an absolute pasting, as they did at the weekend.
The Madejski Stadium has never been a real stronghold of a place that teams fear going to but I’ve lost there a few times with various teams, including Leicester. They need to defend their home patch like there’s no tomorrow.
The crumb of comfort for London Irish is that they have got one victory on the board already and are four points clear of Worcester but you are looking at both at the moment and wondering where the next win is coming from.
They now go to Newcastle, who are sitting pretty in fourth place in the table having won away at Bath, so it’s an uphill struggle.
The Falcons are fourth in the table, deservedly so, and they’ll go top if they win on Friday…who would have thought that at the start of the season?
They have won both of their away games and even in defeat against Saracens in Philadelphia last week they showed some hard-edged rugby that will stand them in good stead in the tight games when the weather turns.
They finished eighth last season and, with the quality they have now got, their aim is absolutely to finish in the top six in this campaign and they are building momentum, which is giving them more and more confidence and belief that they can achieve that.
They will even start asking themselves if they can be a top four team and the nature of the Premiership so far, with some results that nobody would have predicted in the opening four rounds, means they might not be too far away.
I always look for a standout moment of the weekend and Craig Willis’ grubber kick was it for me this weekend. It was not a conventional grubber kick at all. He has deliberately put a bit of outswing on it and that’s something Dave Walder will have been practising with him when looking at different ways to open teams up.
It was a touch of genius and if Danny Cipriani or Beauden Barrett had done it, the world would be going mad and saying how great it was.
Unreal skill with an out swinging grubber by @CraigWillis0 for @FalconsRugby to set up @DTHVDM's try. You'll do well to see better this year
— Andy Goode (@AndyGoode10) September 24, 2017
There is quality throughout their attacking setup and they seem to have a steely edge to them this season as well with Mark Wilson, Will Welch and others stepping up. And, they still have Toby Flood and Maxime Mermoz to come into the team as well.
They won’t be thinking about a relegation scrap any more and will only be looking up and that’s great for the club.
They might have had seven days between games but you take a couple of days to get back from the States and a couple of days to reacclimatize and then you have to prepare for Bath and travel down to the Rec, so they’ve done remarkably well to get the win.
A total of 20 clean breaks and 17 offloads away at the Rec tells you that they’re playing an attractive brand of rugby and really taking it to the opposition, home and away and regardless of who they’re facing.
Dave Walder is head coach now and I think he has been given more licence this year in the attacking game and I think the players are really enjoying the environment. When you’ve been in relegation battles there is a bit of doom and gloom around the place but they are in a different place completely now.
People are talking them up from the outside and saying that they can finish in the top six. That filters in to the players and they start to believe it…if they are serious contenders, they should have no problems in getting a comfortable victory over London Irish at home on Friday.
Comments on RugbyPass
It’s impressive that we can see huge stadiums with attendance in the 40 000 to 50 000 region. It shows how popular this competition is becoming. What is even more impressive is the massive growth in broadcast viewership. The URC is one of the two best leagues in the World, the other being the Top14.
6 Go to commentsChristie is not Sottish, like the majority of the Scotland team.
2 Go to commentsHold the phone, decline over-rated. Is it a one game, dead cat bounce or the real thing? Has the Penney dropped? Stay tuned.
44 Go to commentsTotally deserved win for the Crusaders Far smarter than the Chiefs who seem to be avoiding the basics when it matters Hotham showed them what was missing and Hannah seems a real find - a tad light but that can be fixed over time
8 Go to commentsGreat insight into the performance culture with Sarries and I predict Christie will be a fixture in the Scotland team now for some time to come. However, he is slightly missing his own point around Scotland “being soft” when he cites physicality examples in defence of that slight. The issue is much closer to the example he referenced around feeling off before a game but being told “it doesn’t matter, you can still play well” by Farrell. Until Scotland can get their psyche in that square, they will carry on folding under extreme pressure…
2 Go to comments> We are having to adapt, evolve and innovate more than when we were in Super Rugby where there was only really one style that everybody had to play to gain the most success. Have = able to? Interesting what that one style might be? I thought SA sides still had bad tours now, or at least bad schedule, months away? Those extra few hours flights have to be a killer though, no surprise to see their sides doing so badly at the start of the season each year. I wouldn’t enjoy that unfairness as a supporter.
6 Go to commentsThe problem for NZ, and Aus, is they ripped up the SR model and lost a massive chunk of revenue that hasn’t been replaced. Don’t forget SA clubs went North because they were left with no choice, Argy unceremoniously binned and Japan cast adrift. Now SR wasn’t perfect, far from it, but they’ve jumped into something without an effective plan, so far, to replace what they’ve lost. The biggest revenue potential now lies in Japan but it won’t be easy or quick to unlock, they are incredibly insular in culture as a nation. In the meantime, there is a serious time bomb sitting under SH rugby and if it happens then the current financial challenges will look like a picnic. IF the Boks follow their provincial teams and head north then it’s revenue meltdown. Not guaranteed to happen but the status quo is a very odd hybrid, with the Boks pointing one way and the clubs pointing the other way. And for as long as that remains then the threat is real.
44 Go to commentsI think Etene has had some good tuition, likely while at the Warriors to be a professional that helped his rugby jump, but he was certainly thrown in the deep end way too early. Should have arguably 20 less SR caps, and therefor a way better record that he does at his age, but his development would have been fast tracked by the need to satiate his signing away from league. Again, credit to him and others that he has done it so well. Easy to fall over under that pressure in the big leagues like that but he kept at it when I myself wasn’t sure he was good enough.
1 Go to commentsAwesome story. I wonder what a bigger American (SA) scene might have mean for Brex.
1 Go to comments“Johnny McNicholl and the Crusaders” save a Penney. Who has been in camp this week and showed them how to play?
8 Go to commentsSo, reports of the Crusaders’ demise / terminal decline are perhaps just - slightly - premature/exaggerated…? 🤔 Will we see a deep-dive into that by the estimable Rugbypass scribes, and maybe one or two mea culpas? Thought not.
8 Go to comments1. The Chiefs are rudderless without DMac, which enhances his AB chances 2. Chiefs pack are powderpuffs. The hard men arent there anymore 3. They had their golden title chance last yr and wont threaten this yr. Gone in second round of playoffs.
8 Go to commentsHonestly, why did you have to publish such a foolish article the day they play us? 😂
44 Go to comments> They are not standalone entities. They are linked to an amateur association which holds the FFR licence that allows the professional side to compete in the league. That’s a great rule. This looks like the chicken or egg professional scenario. How long is it going to be before the club can break even (if that is even a thing in French rugby)? If the locals aren’t into well it would be good to se them drop to amateur level (is it that far?). Hope they can reset from this level and be more practical, there will be a time when they can rebuild (if France has there setup right).
1 Go to commentsWhat about changing the ball? To something heavier and more pointed that bounces unpredictably. Not this almost round football used these days.
35 Go to commentsThis is the problem with conservative mindsets and phycology, and homogenous sports, everybody wants to be the same, use the i-win template. Athlete wise everyone has to have muscles and work at the gym to make themselves more likely to hold on that one tackle. Do those players even wonder if they are now more likely to be tackled by that player as a result of there “work”? Really though, too many questions, Jake. Is it better Jake? Yes, because you still have that rugby of ole that you talk about. Is it at the highest International level anymore? No, but you go to your club or checkout your representative side and still engage with that ‘beautiful game’. Could you also have a bit of that at the top if coaches encouraged there team to play and incentivized players like Damian McKenzie and Ange Capuozzo? Of course we could. Sadly Rugby doesn’t, or didn’t, really know what direction to go when professionalism came. Things like the state of northern pitches didn’t help. Over the last two or three decades I feel like I’ve been fortunate to have all that Jake wants. There was International quality Super Rugby to adore, then the next level below I could watch club mates, pulling 9 to 5s, take on the countries best in representative rugby. Rugby played with flair and not too much riding on the consequences. It was beautiful. That largely still exists today, but with the world of rugby not quite getting things right, the picture is now being painted in NZ that that level of rugby is not required in the “pathway” to Super Rugby or All Black rugby. You might wonder if NZR is right and the pathway shouldn’t include the ‘amateur’, but let me tell you, even though the NPC might be made up of people still having to pull 9-5s, we know these people still have dreams to get out of that, and aren’t likely to give them. They will be lost. That will put a real strain on the concept of whether “visceral thrill, derring-do and joyful abandon” type rugby will remain under the professional level here in NZ. I think at some point that can be eroded as well. If only wanting the best athlete’s at the top level wasn’t enough to lose that, shutting off the next group, or level, or rugby players from easy access to express and showcase themselves certainly will. That all comes back around to the same question of professionalism in rugby and whether it got things right, and rugby is better now. Maybe the answer is turning into a “no”?
35 Go to commentsWow, didn’t realise there was such apathy to URC in SA, or by Champions Cup teams. Just read Nick’s article on Crusaders, are Sharks a similar circumstance? I think SA rugby has been far more balanced than NZs, no?
4 Go to commentsBut here in Australia we were told Penney was another gun kiwi coach, for the Tahs…….and yet again it turned out the kiwi coach was completely useless. Another con job on Australian rugby. As was Robbie Deans, as was Dave Rennie. Both coaches dumped from NZ and promoted to Australia as our saviour. And the Tahs lap them up knowing they are second rate and knowing that under pressure when their short comings are exposed in Australia as well, that they will fall in below the largest most powerful province and choose second rate Tah players to save their jobs. As they do and exactly as Joe Schmidt will do. Gauranteed. Schmidt was dumped by NZ too. That’s why he went overseas. That why kiwi coaches take jobs in Australia, to try and prove they are not as bad as NZ thought they were. Then when they get found out they try and ingratiate themselves to NZ again by dragging Australian teams down with ridiculous selections and game plans. NZ rugby’s biggest problem is that it can’t yet transition from MCaw Cheatism. They just don’t know how to try and win on your merits. It is still always a contest to see how much cheating you can get away with. Without a cheating genius like McCaw, they are struggling. This I think is why my wise old mate in NZ thinks Robertson will struggle. The Crusaders are the nursery of McCaw Cheatism. Sean Fitzpatrick was probably the father of it. Robertson doesn’t know anything else but other countries have worked it out.
44 Go to commentsIt could be coincidental or prescient that the All Blacks most dominant period under Steve Hansen was when the Crusaders had their least successful period under Todd Blackadder and then the positions reversed when Razor took over the Crusaders.
44 Go to commentsDefinitely sound read everybodyexpects immediate results these days, I don't think any team would travel well at all having lost three of the most important game changers in the game,compiled with the massive injury list they are now carrying, good to see a different more in depth perspective of a coaches history.
3 Go to comments