by The Irish were as good as motionless after the whistle, motionless in the frenzy. The English were chasing each other across the field, running to catch Marcus Smith, the rest crossing from the bench to join them. Up in the box, Steve Borthwick was hugging the other coaches, and in the stands around them 80,000 spectators were screaming, shouting, crying, roaring, stamping, clapping.
It’s been a long time since Twickenham had something like this. And down in the middle of the story, those 15 Irish players stood completely stunned, some with their hands on their hips, others bent double, as they gasped for fresh breath. It seemed that none of them could quite believe it.
“That’s life,” Andy Farrell told them, followed by everyone else. “That’s rugby.” He offered no apology, criticized the referee or complained about the injuries that forced him to rearrange his team. “I don’t know, maybe it’s stupid to say this, but I thought it would be unfair for England not to win the game, I thought they played really well and they deserved it.”
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Farrell won a lot as a player and coach, but he lost just as much – more, even – in international rugby, when he led a Wales team that lost every decisive game it played against the Australia and New Zealand.
“We’re very good at winning, and now we have to be very good at losing too. We’ll congratulate England, we’ll have a beer with them, then we’ll get ourselves down on Sunday, and make sure we get to Monday with a smile on our face, because we’ve got a championship to play for next weekend.” the grand slam is gone, but there is still a title to win.They must meet, or draw, Scotland in Dublin next week to do it.
Before that, this game will have some picks, and the team’s debriefing on Monday will be long. In those first moments it was too early for anyone involved to tell exactly what had gone wrong, the game was played so fast and so many instructions went by, that many players got the simple details about it all wrong after that.
Their impressions were there in bits and pieces that they hadn’t yet had a chance to piece together into a clear picture: a missed tackle here, an injury or three, a shot that went behind that slipped a little wide, a decisive effort that’s it. turned out, nothing was fixed.
“It’s disappointing that we had it in our grasp,” says Josh van der Flier, “but it only came in a few big moments, and we didn’t get enough of them right.”
Jamison Gibson-Park said: “We haven’t had the time to get our form going, and that’s down to a number of different things.” Gibson-Park knows the blitz defense from Leinster, and he understands better than anyone how well England used it on Saturday. In the minutes he was playing at fly-half, Gibson-Park was lost to time and space, he couldn’t get enough of him to work there, he didn’t have a chance to start Ireland’s complex step-play. .
“That defensive system that England were using, a lot of us have played under a similar system, and we know that you want to put as much pressure on yourself as possible, England did that very well. “
Behind him, Hugo Keenan is chewing over what he calls “the game within the game” in those final eight minutes, when his team was defending a two-point lead. “We definitely could have managed it better,” he says, picking up his memories of what happened in those moments. “We had the restart to clear our lines, we didn’t exit as well as we could have, and they exposed us a little bit on the kick returns.” They had made the old mistake, according to him, of trying to sit back and protect their lead. They had worked so hard to win it, that they could only try to wait for it.
From his seat in the stands, Farrell felt his team needed more control. “Not only with penalties, but with the way we play our game that’s the main thing, the reason they came back into the game.”
Under all the pressure, they became “a bit desperate to try to sort things out on our own, especially at the breakdown” and made a series of small mistakes. “It all adds up. In those final minutes, I thought we could have kicked further and further. One we kicked was long and not out, the other was out but short. And those are the little pieces 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, which is where Ireland has been for the last few weeks. It felt like Borthwick and his coaches had been plotting this one all winter. The question is whether other teams will be able to replicate the way they played, and, if they do, whether Ireland will be able to adapt.
As Farrell thinks, you wouldn’t bet against them. Listen to Keenan. He gets it. “It’s the hurt that makes the loss so intense, that emotional drain. But you always tend to dig deeper in the reviews afterwards, to look at each other a little harder, and that’s how you get better.”
