Ireland vs Scotland 2018 6N

[CiaranIrl]

MFans in a state of confusion after Quinnie gives MOTM to Kearney.
What did Simon ever do to him?

The bile directed at Kearney has really ramped up during this tournament. It's pathetic how they carry on on Munster fans especially. I guess it's a combination of 1. Lack of dilution due to Heaslip's retirement, and 2. the perceived slight on Zebo.

Four 6N medals make their bullshit pretty irrelevant though.

Rongrise had a massive game, MOTM for me. Kearney was good though

I was impressed at Rongrise coming back from such a long injury layoff to play that well today. Furlong and Healy both put in massive shifts. While I wouldn't have given him MOTM, Kearney had his best game in a long time - won a ball in the air, made a couple of decent breaks and successfully challenged/defended high balls when he wasn't going to take them himself.

In fairness to RK played v well today

Yeah, real bile there. Most of what you think happens on MF doesn't you know.

Do you understand what during this tournament means?

[hugonaut]

We put the Scots into the meat grinder and they couldn't deal with it. The Welsh thought they were going to out-pass us and run around us and make us look old-fashioned and one-dimensional, and we put them into the grinder and chewed them up in an hour. The Scots were just as confident and we put them into the grinder and turned them into mince.

Our performances this year in the championship remind me of what the late great All Black Jerry Collins said about the neighbourhood where he grew up: "If it wasn't tough already, I would have made it tough."

[blockhead]

Rory Best. Oh captain, my captain.
Lead us to our 1st win over the All Blacks and our 1st win in South Africa.
Now he has captained us to a 6 Nations Title.
All time great.

[WhiskeyPapa]

Ireland are also now the current holders of the Raeburn Shield, if you believe in that kind of thing.

[sunshiner1]

by Timbit » March 10th, 2018, 11:41 pm

Rongrise had a massive game, MOTM for me. Kearney was good though



I was impressed at Rongrise coming back from such a long injury layoff to play that well today. Furlong and Healy both put in massive shifts. While I wouldn't have given him MOTM, Kearney had his best game in a long time - won a ball in the air, made a couple of decent breaks and successfully challenged/defended high balls when he wasn't going to take them himself.



In fairness to RK played v well today


Yeah, real bile there. Most of what you think happens on MF doesn't you know.

We might beleive you if you idiots could at least spell Ringrose's name correctly.

Expert analysis as always from you guys

[TerenureJim]

[sunshiner1]

by Ruckedtobits

J10 mixed some great handling and hard running, with some inane kicking which surprised me and many close at hand.

Thank you! Don't think he's hit optimum level yet during this tournament. Maybe it's injury or form (or oppositon teams not letting him) but he seems to be off a little. Hope he hits 100% soon. Some of his decision making especially during the first 20 mins had me tearing my hair out.

[suisse]

Do you understand what during this tournament means?

3 quotes are supposed to confirm your bias. Laughable. The42 is just as bad. The treatment the Best Fans In The World dish out to Irish players from another province representing their country in a brutal sport is truly pathetic but customary now online. I don't get why anyone would wanna give MF the hits. But the42 mods are spineless. All they care about is traffic. There's a difference between freedom of expression and allowing idiots swamp articles with the ususal rubbish.

[Twist]

Do you understand what during this tournament means?

3 quotes are supposed to confirm your bias. Laughable. The42 is just as bad. The treatment the Best Fans In The World dish out to Irish players from another province representing their country in a brutal sport is truly pathetic but customary now online. I don't get why anyone would wanna give MF the hits. But the42 mods are spineless. All they care about is traffic. There's a difference between freedom of expression and allowing idiots swamp articles with the ususal rubbish.

I went for a look at MF. Within a minute (on the Ireland v. Scotland thread) I was reading comments criticising northern-born players for not singing Ireland's Call


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Logorrhea]

Certain places like MF.com and the comments section of the42 are just toxic when it comes to certain players from certain provinces. Avoid them, they are not healthy places to spend your time.

[Laighin Break]

Do you understand what during this tournament means?

3 quotes are supposed to confirm your bias. Laughable. The42 is just as bad. The treatment the Best Fans In The World dish out to Irish players from another province representing their country in a brutal sport is truly pathetic but customary now online. I don't get why anyone would wanna give MF the hits. But the42 mods are spineless. All they care about is traffic. There's a difference between freedom of expression and allowing idiots swamp articles with the ususal rubbish.

In fairness there are eejit Leinster fans on the42 comment section too

[LeRouxIsPHat]

Shane Jennings made a great point about how strong we are collectively, and that individuals played really well but it gets lost because there are so many people doing it. I was thinking about that afterwards because it felt like a bit of a flat performance in many ways, but then I went through the team and Healy, Furlong (his carrying was exceptional at times), Ryan, and Leavy were all superb and that's just from the starting pack, Jack was brilliant when he came on as well. Ringrose (my MOTM) and Kearney were excellent too.

We did give up some chances but overall I thought our defence looked better out wide. May have mentioned this before the game but Wales pretty much took all their chances against us, and Scotland took theirs against England, and that level of chance conversion was always unlikely to happen yesterday.

I was disappointed with Scotland, never felt like they believed they could win.

Great achievement to win the championship regardless of what happens next week, hope the players realise that

[Ruckedtobits]

I've rarely been as impressed by the impact of our forward replacements as I was yesterday. McGrath had som immense carries, huge clear-out and lovely offloads. In fact his performance was reminisent of how he earned his Lions call-up. Porter was as Porter is, tough, strong and effective at scrum time and in possession. Jordi Murphy carried and made ground in a manner than no other back-row had beejn able to achieve earlier in the game. He also featured in a couple of excellent line-outs and made 4/5 tackles in his cameo. Cronin was "Nugget"; explosive and effective with or without ball and he "bounced up" to take his try off a messy end-maul. Throwing and tackling were also excellent.

Henderson was simply awesome. His strength, acceleration and athleticism suggest he was sprung too late in the game. Not a reason to select him to start on its own but certainly indicative that as a replacement he understands the need for an explosion when he arrives.

To a lesser extent, both Marmion and Carberry did what was required of them. Larmour did not appear to get a touch.

All eight made their contributions in a manner that proved seamless with their predecessors or even improving on what had gone before. A brilliant coaching performance and further indication of our improved strength in depth.

Overall, this game was one in which the sum of the parts was less that the whole. Healy Best, Furlong, Toner and Ryan all made huge contributions and outplayed their direct opponents and yet the Irish front five never dominated their equivalents.

Similarly in the back-row. Our three warriors each made excellent contributions but never quite overcame the presence of three tough operators who had hallmarked the great Scottish victory against England.

This was a decisive win, but not yet the sort of dominance that we will need against this team when we get to RWC2019. Townsend will be annoyed with the outcome because of the errors in completion by his team. On the otherhand, he and McFarland will know that they are not too far behind Schmidt's team in process and they have a lot of, unrefined, talent throughout their Squad.

[Oldschoolsocks]

MFans in a state of confusion after Quinnie gives MOTM to Kearney.
What did Simon ever do to him?

The bile directed at Kearney has really ramped up during this tournament. It's pathetic how they carry on on Munster fans especially. I guess it's a combination of 1. Lack of dilution due to Heaslip's retirement, and 2. the perceived slight on Zebo.

Four 6N medals make their bullshit pretty irrelevant though.

Rongrise had a massive game, MOTM for me. Kearney was good though

I was impressed at Rongrise coming back from such a long injury layoff to play that well today. Furlong and Healy both put in massive shifts. While I wouldn't have given him MOTM, Kearney had his best game in a long time - won a ball in the air, made a couple of decent breaks and successfully challenged/defended high balls when he wasn't going to take them himself.

In fairness to RK played v well today

Yeah, real bile there. Most of what you think happens on MF doesn't you know.

cherry picking 3 quotes from one thread proves nothing

[Fan with smartphone]

We put the Scots into the meat grinder and they couldn't deal with it. The Welsh thought they were going to out-pass us and run around us and make us look old-fashioned and one-dimensional, and we put them into the grinder and chewed them up in an hour. The Scots were just as confident and we put them into the grinder and turned them into mince.

Our performances this year in the championship remind me of what the late great All Black Jerry Collins said about the neighbourhood where he grew up: "If it wasn't tough already, I would have made it tough."

Nail on the head there. I was a little critical after the French game because I felt we needed to give our run game a bit more room. Turn the defences around a little bit and push more defenders into the backfield. Joe has largely doubled down on the policy though and it has absolutely worked. Yesterday, Ringrose - man of the match for me - gave a bit more velvet glove as a second playmaker compared to the iron fists we used against Wales. We also very cleverly switched the side of the posts we were attacking a few times, but Joe likes the (let’s call it) sureness (because I can’t think of another word) that this game gives him.

He is sure that our breakdown skills and discipline will recycle the ball, so he is sure you can’t score when we have it and he is sure you will give away a penalty before we do. Or, as long as our handling holds up, he is sure we will eventually find a line break (to be fair to France they didn’t offer up many, they barely missed a tackle and yet we still found a way to win).

It’s not everything in the game, but it’s a fair bit of it. Scotland tested it really well I thought - they were quite superb on the ground. It took equally superb play to keep them at bay there. We are in an incredibly good place as a team and extended squad, but winning in Twickenham is well, tough. I can’t imagime too many grand slams in history have been won there. We will have to be tougher than ever to do it.

I do think we can still create more space for ourselves, but we are developing all the time and use wrinkles to try and achieve it against each specific team. The foundations of our game are rock solid. There’s a lot of work for our competitors in getting their teams to that level.

[Experimental]

Personally I agree with Quinnys selection on Rob Kearney as man of the match, well deserved with Leavy or Ryan for a very close second for me. Ringrose had a few dodgy moments in the first half, but really improved his performance in the second.

[blockhead]

The counfusion comtinues down south as to why Quinny picked Kearney as MOTM.

Players who have been better options at fullback over the past 3/4 years: Conway, Zebo, Payne, Henshaw, O'Halloran.
Quinlan knew what he was doing, RK had a poor first half and OK second half. At least 7 players played better and had more positive impact. I do believe Quinlan is trying to keep RK's profile live due to him coming under serious pressure from Lamour and possibly Henshaw with Ringrose and Farrell being better options at 13.

[Oldschool]

The counfusion comtinues down south as to why Quinny picked Kearney as MOTM.

Players who have been better options at fullback over the past 3/4 years: Conway, Zebo, Payne, Henshaw, O'Halloran.
Quinlan knew what he was doing, RK had a poor first half and OK second half. At least 7 players played better and had more positive impact. I do believe Quinlan is trying to keep RK's profile live due to him coming under serious pressure from Lamour and possibly Henshaw with Ringrose and Farrell being better options at 13.

That's just more of the arrant nonsense that we often get from Munster.
I'm only surprised that JJ's name didn't get an airing.

[Ruckedtobits]

The more one reviews this game (and also the Calcutta Cup match), the more one is tempted to believe that Irish pre-match analysis had identified a specific weakness in the defence of the maul by the Scots on their right touchline close to their line.

Kicking the first penalty to the left touchline may have been focussed on capitalising on this perceived weakness in their defensive procedure.

The weakness appears to be how Watson positions himself, if a maul is driven infield. For Conor Murray's try, what happens at the back of the Irish maul edging towards the Scottish line is key. Healy recovers his feet and rejoins the maul with hands on the ball and angled towards the left touchline, which is a 7-10 metre wide corridor. When this happens, Watson deserts his post as left pillar defender and moves behind the Scottish maul and becomes right-side pillar (in case Healy drives towards that side.

As soon as Watson gets to the right-side pillar position, Murray takes possession of the ball and, supported by Aki latching on, drives straight at Finn Russell, who has become left-side pillar. Watson tries to rescue the situation, but is too late.

Essentially, the Irish analysts saw the opportunity to create a Murray v Russell one-on-one, less than 5m for the Scottish line. In probability terms, that's at least a 75% shot for success, i.e. Murray will score three times out of four.

Coupled with the creation of a great opening line-break for Earls and the design of the multi-phase, high speed, twin-pronged attack which resulted in Stockdale's try just before half-time, this is visualisation and imagination of the highest order.

In the latter move, Ireland could have scored going either right or left, determined, one assumes, by how the different Scottish defenders reacted as the move evolves. Murray is once again the decision maker, but in this instance, Sexton is the difficult-to-ignore decoy. The actions of at least five Irish players were key to how this try was scored. Murray Kinsella in The42.ie describes the individual contributions brilliantly.

Those who have played rugby in any fairly competitive environment will remember the hours of rehearsal required to get a succesful 'training-ground move' right. To get two right for the same game was a fantastic piece of preparation.

What have they got in store for us to watch in Twickenham?