Ireland still getting used to favourites tag after retaining Six Nations title

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/mar/22/ireland-favourites-tag-retaining-six-nations-scotland

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The pass was perfect. Finn Russell stooped to gather the stray ball and, without stopping or standing, threw it out towards the right wing, quick as he could cock his head. It left his hands almost exactly as he collided with Tommy Bowe. The ball flew high, over the heads of the two men nearest to him, Blair Cowan and Tim Visser. They turned around just in time to see it land slap in the lap of Stuart Hogg, running in full tilt from full-back, on into the little strip of empty space along the touchline. He caught it without breaking stride, stuttered, stepped inside both Bowe and Jordi Murphy, and dived over the try line. A try! And then a truck hit him from behind. Jamie Heaslip. As they fell forward, Heaslip wrapped his left arm around Hogg’s waist and hauled him around on to his right side. The ball dropped from Hogg’s hands, bounced up and down. A try?

The video replays showed that Heaslip had done just enough. Hogg had dropped the ball when it was still 12 inches or so above the ground. So the score stayed at 40-10, where it still stood when the final whistle went four minutes later. That meant Ireland were 26 points clear at the top of the table. And in the end, of course, they won the Championship by six from England. A single converted try on either side would have swung it. Hogg, and England, were twelve inches and a good kick away. “An incredible piece of skill,” was how Paul O’Connell described Heaslip’s tackle. “I wouldn’t put it down to luck.” He thought for a second, then added: “But I suppose a lot of things did happen, for all three games to go like that, for us to come out on top. Maybe someone was smiling down on us. I don’t know.”

They say luck is what you make it, that the harder you practice, the more of it you enjoy. But when you have won a championship that spans 15 matches and 20 hours of play by such a slender lead, you would have to be proud as a mule or foolish as an ass not to give thanks for all the little things that fell right along the way.

“Such fine margins. We’re champions because England didn’t quite get that drive over at the end,” Joe Schmidt, the Ireland head coach, said, referring to that last desperate lineout against the French, when Chris Robshaw had furiously ordered George Ford to throw his 13st frame into the fray in the hope it would add the precious few extra pounds-per-square-inch that would carry the ball over the line. “And because [Leonardo] Sarto scored in the corner, and [Luciano] Orquera kicked that goal,” thinking back now to the final Italian try that cut seven crucial points from the Welsh lead, when Sarto’s left boot had been a lace away from touch. “And because Jamie made that tackle.”

“That is the long scramble that it is,” said Schmidt. “It’s so tough to win. Eight weeks ago, I looked at the road ahead, and I said to myself ‘Oh wow.’ You look at it and you go, ‘Gee, that’s a tough game’, and then ‘Oh, that’s a tough game too.’” Still, for all those fine margins, Ireland have come out on top two years in a row now, by 10 points one year and six the next. Which tells you two things. The gaps between the top three teams, Ireland, England, and Wales are desperately thin, but Ireland are undoubtedly the best of them.

That status has brought its own pressure, a kind that Ireland, who love to play the underdog, are not so used to. As Luke Fitzgerald said on Saturday, “what’s interesting about Ireland is that because we’re a small nation, maybe there’s a mindset there that we can’t compete with the big guys, that we’re being talked down. In this whole championship I think the team has been talked up. Today we were favourites for the game and we went out and put in a really quality performance.”

Since Schmidt took charge, Ireland have lost only four Tests out of 20. Of those, the losses to England at Twickenham and New Zealand at Lansdowne Road were both by three points or less. They have been soundly beaten twice, once by Australia in Schmidt’s first major Test in charge, and then in the seven-point defeat to Wales. And as Schmidt said, they actually took a lot of heart from the loss. “You give Wales a 12-point head start, and you get to within four of them and put them under a lot of pressure, that in its own way gave us a little bit of confidence.”

Ireland deserve to be ranked third in the world and, to be blunt, should expect to make at least the semi-finals of the 2015 World Cup given that they have a good draw. Their first two matches are almost warm-ups, against Canada and Romania. Then the intensity builds through games against Italy and France. Win those and they should have a quarter-final against Argentina.

Say that to Schmidt, and watch him squirm. “Hopefully we can continue to stay a little bit under the radar,” he says. “I’m not sure we can. Maybe we’ve blown that. But we’ve got to try.” He wants to keep things low-key for the World Cup. And that’s where an appreciation of those fine margins comes in handy. “They can swing at any time. That’s why I say we’ve got to keep working and trying to get better, because there is not a lot of breathing space,” he says. “The more you do manage to put your nose in front, the bigger the target on your chest.”

Schmidt, who suffered through every minute of that final day – “it builds coronaries for coaches” – said that he got so caught up in it all that he needed to give himself a reality check. That “reality for me is that I’m on Dad duty.” His son, Luke, has severe epilepsy. On Tuesday, the family are travelling overseas to get him specialist medical help. “So reality for me is a long way from rugby. I will park the rugby for a little while, and we’ll see if we can get really lucky on both sides of what’s important to us.” He says he will start thinking about the World Cup in April. Ireland will be waiting. So will the rest of the world.

Scotland Hogg; Fife, Bennett (Visser, 71), Scott (Tonks, 69), Seymour; Russell, Laidlaw (capt; Hidalgo-Clyne, 55 ); Grant (Dickinson, 31), Ford (Brown, 52), Murray (Cross, 15), Hamilton (Swinson, 52), Gray, Ashe (Harley 56), Cowan, Denton.

Try Russell. Con Laidlaw. Pen Laidlaw.

Sin-bin Cross 56.

Ireland R Kearney; Bowe, Payne, Henshaw, Fitzgerald; Sexton (Madigan, 71), Murray (Reddan, 79); Healy (McGrath, 52), Best, Ross (Cronin, 61), Toner (Henderson, 61), O’Connell, O’Mahony, O’Brien (Murphy, 73), Heaslip.

Tries O’Connell, O’Brien 2, Payne. Cons Sexton 3, Madigan. Pens Sexton 4

Referee J Garcès (France). Att 67,144.