Loose Pass: Ireland, England and Spain’s pain

Editor

This week we will be mostly concerning ourselves with Ireland’s rise, England’s demise and Spain’s misadventures in Belgium.

Envy with green

The St Patrick’s Day hangovers have yet to fully dissipate, but already the question is being asked: could Ireland really win the Rugby World Cup?

On the evidence of the last couple of months – no matter what amount of Guinness you’ve quaffed – you’d have to say: yes, absolutely.

It seems almost a ludicrous suggestion to make of a nation that, less than a decade ago, had just the one Grand Slam to its name.

And even after they bagged that second clean sweep, many believed that Ireland would soon return to ‘plucky’ mediocrity following the retirement of the twin titans of Irish rugby, Paul O’Connell and Brian O’Driscoll.

Wrong. The class of 2018 is a cut above anything that has come before it.

Cut back to Saturday morning: everyone expected the men in green to fluff their lines. The bookies (who are never seen riding bikes) had them at evens at best, coldly calculating that they would choke on the pressure of having to travel to Twickenham to face a wounded England side with nothing to lose.

It wasn’t even close!

It’s the accuracy of the Irish game that astounds. No one gets panicked. Everyone knows exactly what to do and when to do it and where to do it. No one gets in the way, everyone knows their place, everyone knows their role.

For an easy-to-edit showreel of these steel-nerved talents, look no further than the two minutes that preceded Johnny Sexton’s drop-goal in Paris during the opening round of the tournament. Some 40-odd phases of complete collective focus not only won the match, it decided the tournament.

We’d even go one vast step further and say it will go on to define this era of Irish rugby. Those two minutes now form a bubbling well from which the players will continue to draw buckets of self-belief.

Those two minutes carry shades of England’s series of six-man scrums during their famous win over New Zealand in Wellington in 2003, and Martin Johnson’s immortal reply on being asked what was going through his head during those tense set-pieces: “My spine.”

No one knew it at the time, but the ensuing World Cup was won then and there.

England had proved that they had the backbone, and so, now, have Ireland.

Brain power

With all due reverence to Ireland, the real story of the latest edition of the Six Nations is surely England. Is there any other team in world sport that has the ability to unravel so quickly and so often?

It’s hard to know exactly what was behind their latest implosion, but fingers are being pointed towards the vast workloads that the England players are forced to endure, and the lack of R&R that their large contingent of Lions was allotted during the back end of last year.

Regular readers of this column will now be bracing themselves for another lengthy moan about the perils of player burn-out, but we’re not going there this week. It’s not that we don’t believe it’s a huge factor, it’s just that England’s current problems appear to go deeper. Indeed, it wasn’t the physical lethargy that shocked us, it was the mental malaise.

Time and again, England were simply out-thought by the opposition. They didn’t seem to have the cerebral dexterity to extradite themselves from holes, or the nous to conjure impromptu attacks from open play.

And this blockheadness isn’t confined to the players on the pitch. Who’s idea was it to extend Twickenham’s dead-ball area for Saturday’s game? This ahead of a visit from the best out-of-hand kickers in world rugby? Ireland duly seized on the opportunity whereas England appeared not to have given the extra dimensions even a second thought.

For Loose Pass, this slow-wittedness lies at the heart of what Eddie Jones regularly refers to – rather euphemistically, perhaps – as English rugby’s “traditional strengths”.

English selectors – at all levels – are drawn to physical specimens. They then attempt to add footballing brains.

As New Zealand and Australia have always known – and as Ireland are now discovering – it’s much easier to find footballing brains and then add the requisite physicality.

England’s whole system needs a rethink, but we’re not holding our breath – not when the default reaction to defeat remains axing the team’s most intelligent  footballer.

England needs more George Fords, not fewer.

The pain of Spain

This column has always extolled the virtues of the Rugby Europe Championship (or ‘Six Nations B’), and we’ve longed for it to be granted greater exposure. Well, we should be careful what we wish for: it’s currently all over the sporting pages.

If you’ve missed it (how?), let’s briefly recap.

High-flying Spain needed victory over lowly Belgium to win instant qualification to the Rugby World Cup. It shouldn’t be a difficult task: Spain beat Russia in Russia just a week before Russia tonked Belgium 48-7 at the same venue.

A Spanish slip-up in Belgium would see Romania qualify for Japan, so the Spanish Rugby Federation has the foresight to query whether the allocated refereeing team – comprising three Romanians – is the best fit for a game of such high stakes. Rugby Europe rejects the appeal and the game is played as planned.

And what a game it was. Belgium raced in front and stayed in front, securing an 18-10 win.

Latin tempers duly flared at the final whistle as their Japanese dream all but dissolved before their eyes. Spanish players crowded around the referee. There was furious remonstration, sarcastic clapping, a few shoves.

There’s no way we could condone this sort of behaviour. To see a rugby referee having to be escorted not just off the pitch, but right out of the stadium and into the street, shames our game.

But we feel for the Spanish. Some have accused referee Vlad Iordachescu of bias, perhaps of even throwing the game to ease his homeland through to the World Cup.

But we can’t go that far. We’d just label his performance in Belgium as, charitably, the most incompetent we have seen outside pub rugby circles.

Was he just having a bad day? Surely that’s the only logical explanation. Iordachescu is normally a half-decent whistler and has been reffing Tests since 2009.

What’s more, there’s not enough money in Romanian rugby – or even world rugby – to convince a man to throw away a burgeoning career by humiliating himself in public. But, unfortunately, he seems to have done just that.

Given the utterly eccentric nature of his performance and the uninitiated TV crew that was in attendance, it’s hard to gauge the exact penalty count. Rugby Europe, the body in charge of the tournament, have also yet to release the official stats. But we’ve watched the tape and make it seven penalties against Belgium to 18 against Spain. That should set alarm bells ringing: if you are incompetent, you are incompetent across the board – the penalty count should be roughly equally.

But it must be noted that Spain (who did not play well) also got away with quite a bit, and that Belgium was also pinged for unfathomable reasons on a number of occasion.

So we’re going to put Iordachescu’s performance down to gross incompetency, brought on by the pressure of the occasion and the magnitude of the prize at stake.

The poor bloke would have known all about Spain’s unsuccessful appeal. As a trained arbitrator of law, he probably knew that he should have been recused. Best to remove all elements of doubt and any insinuation of bias. But he was told to get on with it. This, we can only assume, not only played on his mind but completely frazzled it.

So we welcome news that World Rugby is now reviewing “the context of events relating to the Belgium v Spain match”. We need to understand why Spain’s appeal garnered absolutely no traction with the blazers at Rugby Europe.

Of course, we can’t have teams picking their favourite referees, but Spain’s appeal floundered during the same week that Ireland managed to have assistant referee Marius van der Westhuizen excluded from the big game at Twickenham for the crime of attending an England training session.

Obviously not all animals are equal in the rugby world, but if World Rugby can see the benefits of avoiding “unfair conjecture”, why can’t Rugby Europe?

And if it’s a money thing, more could so easily be pumped towards the bottom of the tank. All World Rugby need do is desist in flying TMOs to Europe from the other ends of earth, only to have them make consistently dubious calls.

But that’s another story!

Loose Pass is compiled by former Planet Rugby editor Andy Jackson