There's clearly no panic yet, and nor should there be. Yet the back-to-back defeats against Wales and England do heighten the need for Ireland to generate momentum in the World Cup pool stages with convincing wins over Canada and Romania.
In 2003, handsome wins over Romania and Namibia were the precursor to beating Argentina and coming within a point of Australia, but the struggle to beat Namibia and especially Georgia left Ireland in no state to beat the hosts France or an in-form Argentina, and a pool exit followed.
Four years ago, admittedly, Ireland lost all four warm-up games and didn’t exactly hit the ground running with a 22-10 win over the USA on a horrid night in the Yarrow Stadium, only to then turn over Australia at Eden Park.
Even so, while striving not to generate too much pressure on themselves, Rory Best accepted yesterday that, "ultimately, you have to try and generate momentum somewhere. We need a result this weekend, there's no doubt about it. If you don't get a result this weekend there's massive pressure on you going into the next three games and there are certain areas of the game in the summer that we know need to get better."
“The big focus for us is to improve those areas and that we start to build the performances. Probably the difference between four years ago and eight years ago was when we lost those [warm-up] games, we tried to learn from that, to move on and use it during the World Cup.
“Eight years ago we thought it would be okay when we got our best XV out. Ultimately it wasn’t. We hadn’t learned any lessons from our games during the summer in 2007 and we fell very much short. This time around we are taking some of the good bits out of it, but we are also taking some of the bad bits out of it too.”
‘Real expectation’
The lessons of 2007 appear particularly pertinent, when Best was one of Ireland’s try scorers in that 14-10 win over Georgia. “With that one, there was a real expectation on the starting XV that took the field and there was probably no real expectation on the 15 who were either on the bench or sat in the stands. That was probably the big downfall for that squad when you look back on it. Whenever things weren’t going right for us, there weren’t really tried and tested people on the bench who could come on. We knew there was a lot of quality there but they maybe weren’t trusted in the same way this squad is.”
Best accepts that Ireland have three or four key players, but argues that the same applies to all other squads.
“I think every squad has key guys and you sort of think you can’t cope without them until you have to cope without them. You look at four years ago and New Zealand when they lost Carter and McCaw and everyone said ‘oh, they’re going to be in big trouble’. The pressure just swings on to someone else and when you have a lot of quality in the squad like we feel we have, we have players who can cope with it, rise and maybe play 10 per cent above what you think they can do, which gets them closer to your so-called star players.”
Official match ball
As the main thrower, Best will have to adapt to the official match ball for the 2015 World Cup, the Gilbert Match XV. “We used it a bit last week, we’ll use it this week. We play with the ‘rhino’ in the Pro12 and the Gilbert in the European
Champions Cup
. Different teams use different balls.
“We have been a little bit better prepared for it, because we have had it for a bit now, but this week you have to just try to tell yourself ‘it’s just a ball’. You get used to it and hopefully by the end of the day you will be well and truly used to it.”
