Battered, bruised and beaten, defeat brings curtain down on poor season for Ireland
Australia 22
Ireland 15
In a corporate box next door to our position in Suncorp Stadium last night, there was a TV tuned into the game we were watching. Handy for replays and that sort of thing.
Long before the finish they had changed the channel. To a rugby league game between South Sydney and Melbourne. You might think this remarkable in a match where the margin was only seven points. It wasn't hard to understand though -- this was awful stuff. Two understrength teams: one of them knackered; the other so far removed from where they want to be as to make the Tri Nations a fearful prospect for them.
What happens in that competition is for Robbie Deans to worry about. Declan Kidney has enough on his plate. It makes no sense to pan a team for playing so poorly when they are so far removed from a first-choice selection. At one stage in the second half, when Donncha O'Callaghan went to the blood bin and Dan Tuohy came on, you looked at the make-up of the Irish pack and wondered how this group could be on active service in a Test match.
Throughout they had struggled at the scrum against -- with their first-choice Wallaby front-row out injured -- one of the weakest scrummaging units in the world game. And with no line-out presence at the tail, and their key line-out players (Jerry Flannery, Paul O'Connell and John Hayes) uninvolved, there was no threat whatsoever on Australia's throw, and not much comfort on Ireland's.
Throw in a few sub-par performances from key players Brian O'Driscoll and Tomas O'Leary and you wonder how they were so close at the finish. The captain made four handling mistakes, two of them in critical attacking positions, and, given Ireland were creating so little, this hobbled their progress.
O'Leary's passing -- and to a lesser extent his all-round game -- was well off the mark too. This seemed to be an issue he had squared away, but over the two Tests out here he threw out an unacceptable number of howlers. Add in a couple of penalties to touch from Jonny Sexton and Geordan Murphy that were left short when Ireland desperately needed them to find their target, and the picture was of a team lurching from one mini-crisis to the next.
If only the Wallabies hadn't been so profligate it would have been a lopsided scoreline at the finish. But they put down an extraordinary amount of ball themselves. In the absence of their star turn Will Genia, the talented Luke Burgess had a chance to enhance his reputation, but he spilled a lot at the base. He balanced it up with a try, and moreover, was able to get away with a heap of running around the base of the breakdown without being molested.
And yet Ireland could have gone in at half-time with a handy lead of 15-11 until they offered up five points to man-of-the-match Quade Cooper, which he grabbed with both hands. Every time he got the ball he looked to take on the nearest defender, and if that defender was a forward then he was guaranteed to make a bust. Which is what he did to Shane Jennings from close range.
The hooter had already gone and the Wallabies were trying to do something with slow ball. The out-half announced his intent with a bit of shuffle and then he took Jennings on the outside to score. The Leinster flanker had been having a poor 40 minutes, struggling to make side-on tackles and making no impression on the Wallabies at the breakdown. That was a sickener for him, and the team.
So the Wallabies went in to a half-time message that if they could run through enough phases, something good would happen for them. Their problem was Sexton. He finished with five from five shots on goal, so if they could only stop conceding penalties within range they would be okay.
He had Ireland 6-0 ahead after 10 minutes before Burgess intercepted a pass from debutant Chris Henry to score, and coming soon after a Cooper penalty, it gave Australia the lead on 18 minutes. But Sexton kept pegging them back and it would have been great for their morale if Ireland could have got to half-time ahead.
They came out for the second half without Tony Buckley, who looked in serious trouble when a scrum collapsed. He went for a scan after the game. Australia brought on Kurtley Beale for Rob Horne and he added to their running threat.
Ireland scrambled well to cope, however, and they did really well not to concede more than six points in the second half. On the times they did make progress at the other end, they spilled the ball -- O'Driscoll knocking on after a pass from Tommy Bowe that the wing probably should have kept to himself, and Jennings spilling a pass he wasn't expecting from the captain.
By the time we got to the final quarter they had made a huge number of tackles and were out on their feet.
"We definitely felt we were on top of them in the end," Rocky Elsom said afterwards. "Sometimes the scoreboard can really help you when they were out of the game and you could see that in the way they were moving around the field. When it got towards the end of the game it was slipping away from them and you could see that in their body language."
Our friends in the corporate box had, by that stage, started looking at different bodies in a different code in a different city. You could hardly blame them.
Scorers -- Australia: Cooper try, 2 pens; Burgess try; Giteau 2 pens; Ireland: Sexton 5 pens
Australia: J O'Connor; D Mitchell, R Horne (K Beale h-t), M Giteau, A Ashley-Cooper; Q Cooper, L Burgess; B Daley (J Slipper 54), S Faingaa, S Ma'afu, D Mumm, M Chisholm, R Elsom (capt), R Brown, D Pocock
Ireland: R Kearney (G Murphy 53); T Bowe, B O'Driscoll (capt), P Wallace; J Sexton, T O'Leary; C Healy, S Cronin (D Varley 70), T Buckley (T Curt ht), D O'Callaghan, M O'Driscoll (D Tuohy 70), N Ronan, C Henry (R Ruddock 69), S Jennings
Referee: B Lawrence (New Zealand)
- brendan fanning
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