EVEN PAUL O’CONNELL came close to apologising for sounding “like a broken record” after Saturday’s win over Australia.
The message from players and coaches within Ireland’s international rugby camp is as simple as it is repetitive. They are not getting giddy about their success, stocking up on silver polish or making room in the cabinet for more medals. To achieve their goals, they’re simply trying to find ways to improve in every camp, every week and right down to every training session.
Building towards that next goal, the Six Nations, quite possibly began even before Joe Schmidt left his hospital bed this weekend.
The relentless coach will hand out homework to his squad to work on after the leaders in his squad provide their own feedback to help the coaching staff compile an intensive review session next month.
“We’ll speak by phone a couple of times; he has rang a couple of guys in the leadership group, or he might send out an email and we’ll reply – those of us who can write and spell will write back,” jokes Jonathan Sexton.
“He takes all that on board and he’ll make the final analysis on things and put it to us in the Christmas camp. At times he doesn’t look for player feedback because he’s certain on what’s going on. Other times he will, so I’m not sure what he’ll do over the next couple of weeks when he’s better and he’s healthy.
“He’ll probably say there’s plenty to work on like we did coming into this campaign after the summer Tests against Argentina.”
The review over Christmas won’t be quite as painful as it was at the same stage last year when Schmidt presented the players with the failings that allowed New Zealand to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat at the Aviva Stadium.
The out-half feels that winning games over South Africa and a tight contest against Australia are proof that the team’s defence has been reinforced. Although Sexton was quick to defer to Schmidt when asked what his side must do differently next time, he does expect the coach to be running through Ireland’s attacking gameplan off both set-pieces and phase play. However, that does not necessarily mean that Ireland will suddenly kick the ball less.
“As senior players we sit down with the coaches. When you are not getting that first phase possession as much as you would like, you are getting a lot of ball in your own half like we did, it’s natural that you are going to kick a little bit more.
“It’s the quality of our kicks as well that we have to make sure is right. If we have to kick more then that’s fine, but we wanted to kick to contest, we wanted to kick long and make them to make decisions back at us. We did that well at times and not so well at other times.
“We will probably look at when we kicked and see if that was the right decision at the time. There was probably even times against Australia where we ran it and we maybe should have got onto the edge and put a bit of pressure on them there and we didn’t quite get the pass away.”
He added: “It’s just the circumstances. We didn’t plan to kick it as much but there are different reasons piled on top of each other why we did it and at times we kicked really well and times not so good.
“Whatever we did, we seemed to put pressure on the opposition and we got the result – but we know it might not be good enough come the Six Nations and we have to have more strings to our bow.”
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