Idea of Ireland holding back for the World Cup doesn’t hold up

I’ve been hearing an awful lot as of late about the possibility of Joe Schmidt “holding things back” for the World Cup and this, somehow, is an explanation for some of Ireland’s below par performances. I don’t think that Schmidt is holding any significant stuff back for the World Cup. 

A lot of Ireland’s issues over the course of the last three games have been mainly to do with personnel changes rather than directly limiting the things we’re trying to execute out on the field.

I’m sure we have some set piece strike moves that we’re keeping close to our chest – and I’ll go over those in a minute – but on the whole, the way you play is pretty much the way you play so far as what you try to do out on the field phase to phase. 

Every side will have a few little wrinkles that they look to bring into that phase play but, for the most part, you can’t really “keep stuff back” when it comes to playing at test level. 

Ireland hit France hard in the last World Cup but, if you’ll recall, we had a full strength side out for that game and then proceeded to lose Peter O’Mahony, Jared Payne (hugely important to us at the time), Johnny Sexton, Paul O’Connell and Sean O’Brien for the next match against Argentina.

That, more than anything else in my opinion, played the biggest part in Ireland’s collapse against Los Pumas. Even if we had held things back for that game, when you’re executing it under pressure with a mix and match side rather than your top guys, you’ll be banking on a little more luck than you’d normally be hoping for. 

But I do recall the idea that Schmidt was “keeping things back” for the World Cup around 2015 and I’ve seen the same things this year. I don’t think that Schmidt really thinks that way though, and that is mostly to do with how Ireland analyse the opposition, how the opposition analyse you and, almost more importantly, how you analyse yourself. 

Joe Schmidt’s system and way of looking at the game tries to remove as many variables as it possibly can. Schmidt is not a coach who sends his players out with a loose instruction to  “get it to Ringrose, so he can produce a bit of magic for us” because that would be relying on luck.

When you hear guys talking about getting someone into the team who can give you a bit of “X-Factor”, just know they’re talking about the rugby equivalent of a Mystery Box.

You’ll get away with Mystery Box players in the PRO14 regular season, and in some Champions Cup pool games, but once the intensity of the match situation ramps up, you’ll need more than the hope that your guy will pull a rabbit out of a hat if you need one. 

That’s why Schmidt’s Ireland play with a rotation of multi-pod heavy ball carriers when they play at their best. 

Why? Because even if the opposition watches them for three weeks before the game, their players will still have to go out and stop them on the field. That’s something that looks easier on the screen than it does on grass.

There’s no luck involved in holding onto the ball for 5-6 phases, hurting the opposition in those phases, launching a contestable box kick with a hard chase that forces the opposition to run back 10/15m after five or six high tempo tackle/rucks and then forcing them to work an exit. If they kick back to you, go at them again.

If they kick the ball out, attack them through the maul or hit them with a strike move you know inside out to catch their weakness. Everything you do reduces the opponent’s collective gas tank just a little, so even if it doesn’t pay off on one attacking set, it’ll make it easier on another one later in the game when guys are fatigued.

All you need is one or two guys getting up from a ruck a little slower or reaching a collision point a half a second late, and you have them. This is not a system that will have allows secret additions to it hidden away in Carton House for the World Cup. 

There are a few strike plays and strike phase variants, but they are opposition and context dependent. Scotland, for example, are first up so will, presumably, be in excellent shape and highly motivated.

We’ll approach this game differently because of the timing of it. Assuming we’re fit and firing heading into that game, we’ll mainly focus on the games we’ve played against Scotland this year and last year, and try to see where we can catch them.

Maybe we’ll see something in Munster’s game against Edinburgh that might expose a tendency we can exploit in their Scottish players. If it does, Schmidt will see it and note it.

If Leinster play Glasgow, maybe Schmidt will see something in the way that their international midfield defends against Leinster’s lineout set piece that we can exploit.

If it does, Schmidt will see it and note it. We’ll be looking at Scotland’s previous games against Ireland and scouting ourselves to see where we would appear weak to them, or where they were concentrating defensive effort. 

To answer your main points; How much can we hold back and maintain standards? 

Plenty! Because most of what you hold back is set piece stuff that is opposition specific. You can’t – at least in my opinion – hold back swathes of Special Moves to unleash on everyone. There’s a way you play, and you train like you play to build fluency. You can add bits to your basic style but nothing that’s wildly different, otherwise you lose focus on what you’re good at. 

Are we seeing a combination of experiment and withholding right now, or are we fine tuning our WC style?

I think we’re seeing how different players slot into the preferred style and how the team performance reacts to those players.

We’re also seeing a few alternate plans based on how we react if we lose key ball carrying assets in a World Cup scenario and if we can patch together a way to play the way we want with guys from further down the depth chart. 

Essentially, if we lose CJ Stander, Dan Leavy and Jack Conan two weeks before the World Cup – God forbid – then can we duplicate what they give us with personnel elsewhere? Can we get the ball carrying we need from another source? Or do we have to change aspects of our game in that scenario? 

If we lose James Ryan before Scotland, do we have a tighthead lock that can fill his role? Or do we have to change our structure in the pack to find his ball carrying elsewhere if we can’t go like for like? 

That’s what we’re seeing right now and will see more of during the warm up games. We have a style that we know can beat the best in the world when we have all the pieces for it. The closer we can get to that, the better chance we’ll have of winning the World Cup. That’s our style for the World Cup. We’re just making sure we have the pieces to keep our engine running the way we want it to when it counts.