The Irish were as good as motionless after the whistle, unmoving in the tumult. The English were chasing each other across the pitch, running to catch Marcus Smith, the rest haring across from the bench to join them. Up in the box, Steve Borthwick was hugging the other coaches, and in the stands all around them 80,000 spectators were screaming, shouting, wailing, roaring, stamping, clapping.
It’s been a long while since there was anything like it at Twickenham. And down in the middle of it all, those 15 Irish players just stood shocked still, some with their hands on their hips, others were bent double, sucking in fresh breath. It seemed none of them could quite believe it.
“That’s life,” Andy Farrell told them, and everyone else, afterwards. “That’s rugby.” He didn’t offer any excuses, didn’t criticise the referee or complain about the injuries which forced him to rearrange his team. “I don’t know, I might sound stupid saying this, but I thought it would be unjust for England not to win the game, I thought they played really well and deserved it.”
Farrell won a lot as a player and a coach, but lost just as much – more, even – in international rugby, when he led a Great British side that lost every deciding game it played against Australia and New Zealand.
“We’ve been very good at winning, and now we’ve got to be very good at losing too. We’ll congratulate England, we’ll have a beer with them, then dust ourselves down on Sunday, and make sure we turn up on Monday with smiles on our faces, because we’ve got a championship to play for next weekend.” The grand slam has gone, but there is still a title to be won. They need to beat, or draw, with Scotland in Dublin next week to do it.
Before that, this match will take some unpicking, and the team debriefing on Monday will be a long one. In those first moments it was too early for anyone involved to tell exactly what had gone wrong, the game was played at such a pace, and swung in so many directions, that a lot of players got the simple details of it all wrong afterwards.
Their impressions existed in bits and pieces which they hadn’t had a chance to put together into a clear picture yet: a missed tackle here, an injury or three, a shot at goal that slipped by just wide, a decisive try that, it turned out, hadn’t settled anything.
“What makes it so disappointing is that we had it in our grasp,” says Josh van der Flier, “but it all came down to just a couple of big moments, and we didn’t get enough of them right.”
Jamison Gibson-Park says: “We just didn’t have time to get our shape going, and that’s down to a number of different things.” Gibson-Park knows the blitz defence from Leinster, and understood better than anyone how well England had used it on Saturday. In the minutes he was playing scrum-half, Gibson-Park was lost for time and space, he just could not get enough of it to work in, had no chance to spark Ireland’s intricate phase-play.
“That defensive system England were using, a lot of us play under a similar one, and we know that you want to put as much ruck pressure on as you possibly can, England did that very well.”
Behind him, Hugo Keenan chews over what he calls “the game within the game” in those final eight minutes, when his side were defending a two-point lead. “We could definitely manage it better,” he says, picking over his recollections of what happened in those moments. “We had the restart to clear our lines, we didn’t exit as well as we could, and they exposed us a bit on the kick returns.” They had made the old mistake, he feels, of trying to sit back and defend their lead. They had worked so hard to win it, that all they could think to do was try to hang on to it.
From his seat in the stands, Farrell felt his team needed to be more disciplined. “Not just with penalties, but in how we play our game that’s the main thing, the reason why they got back into the game.”
Under all the pressure, they “became a little bit desperate to try and solve things on our own, especially at the breakdown” and made a series of small mistakes. “It all accumulates. In those final minutes, I thought we could have kicked longer and out. There was one we kicked long and not out, the other was out but short. And those are small bits that matter in the end.”
If it felt like an ambush, well, that’s the risk of being out on your own in front of everyone else, where Ireland have been for the past few weeks. It felt like Borthwick and his coaches had been plotting this one all winter. The question is whether other teams are going to be able to replicate the way they played, and, if they do, whether Ireland are going to be able to adapt to it.
The way Farrell thinks, you wouldn’t bet against them. Just listen to Keenan. He gets it. “The hurt is what makes losing so tough, that emotional dip. But then you always tend to dig deeper in the reviews afterwards, to look at each other that bit harder, and that’s how you get better.”
