Just as it’s difficult to see any fault in a 44-10 win, is it hard to feel overly confident in facing Italy and France with big wins over Canada and Romanian as the foundation stones.
A cautious Paul O’Connell is not going to race ahead of the tournament and while a cumulative 94 points is good for Irish business, that is all it is. This Irish side has never been accused of being consumed by bravado or arrogance.
Canada were Canada and Romania Romania. Good work has been done but now Ireland have to readjust their mindset, recalibrate and decide what will make a good enough performance to challenge two Six Nations teams around the corner.
“I wouldn’t say we’ve a lot to improve on,” said O’Connell, who came on in the second half. “Probably bit of a mind shift in the next two weeks as we’re playing against two Six Nations teams, teams that know us very well, teams we know very well.
“We’d a very close game with France the last two seasons, were lucky enough to beat them, a close game against Italy in Rome and this year we were lucky enough to beat them. Two massive weeks ahead of us now.”
Italy had their problems with a player strike over bonus payments before the World Cup started, which cost them a week's training. Then they were hit with a series of injuries, almost lost to Canada and still do not have their inspirational but injured player Sergio Parisse in London.
His arrival might galvanise the Italian side and O’Connell knows what a difference a returning Parisse would make.
“He makes a massive difference. He’s a world class player, a former Player of the Year,” says the Irish lock. “A lot of their defensive lineouts run around him. A lot of their attacking lineouts run around him. We spoke today of how good the Irish setpieces were . . . they are going to be a lot harder if he is around. Also around the field he can produce that something different that can put you under pressure, which over the past two weeks we haven’t had.”
There is, O’Connell says, plenty to please the coach but also improvements to be made. He is not under the impression that the next two games will be won on the performances of the last two.
But tournament rugby is, maybe counter-intuitively, more of a long-distance thought process than a match-by-match event, even though the players refuse to think further than the next team. That’s the coach’s domain. But for now O’Connell is satisfied with Ireland’s World Cup condition.
Stiffer challenges
“I suppose we’ve come through these two games injury-free, I hope, and with the squad intact. That is very good for us. We’ve done a lot of good things these past two weeks that maybe we didn’t do in the previous two against Wales and England.
“The previous two weeks were stiffer challenges and I suppose it’s harder to do those things well. But I do think there has been an improvement and I hope we can bring it into the Italy game.
“Even today we did a lot of things really well but didn’t break them down. We need our carriers to be that little bit more aggressive, our ruck ball to be that bit quicker. In the England and Welsh games it was a bit slower. I think there has been an improvement in that over the last two weeks.”
Experience
It has always been thus with the Irish secondrow. Maybe with his experience and long years in the trenches with
Munster
and Ireland he has seen it all and watched how the best-laid plans can turn to dust.
Shock results like Japan’s win over South Africa can sometimes glue teams together, remind them that there are plenty of cracks to fall through.
“We weren’t looking at it that way at all,” he says of using Canada and Romania as stepping stones to bigger things.
“You look what happened to Japan and South Africa. USA and Scotland was a really tight game, a really tight game until halftime. We were very, very careful not to get ahead of ourselves in any of the games. We have been very careful to take it week by week. That’s what we’ve done for two years and we’re not going to deviate.”
But he wasn’t going to leave Wembley Stadium with anything other than a breezy feeling about the job done. There was a lot of good about Ireland and it is on that that the team and O’Connell will move forward.
“I thought we went through some great phases and put them under a lot of pressure. We did that a load of times and couldn’t break them. Defensively they were very good,” O’Connell says.
