Ex-Ireland star Gordon D’Arcy has delivered a damming assessment of the Leinster-dominated Irish attack that Andy Farrell started with last Thursday in Paris.
The under-pressure double Six Nations champions of 2023 and 2024 ran out with a XV containing 10 Leinster players in the hope that they had the attacking nous to ask serious questions of the French in the 2026 championship opener.
Those hopes never came to fruition. Instead, Ireland were ‘nilled’ in the opening half, trooping off at the break trailing 0-22. That margin extended to 0-29 and while there was then a mini-Irish revival, the result at the finish was 14-36.
There has been a massive inquest into what unfolded, but D’Arcy has now come to the inquest six days after it began with a troubling reflection that doesn’t read well for his former club team, Leinster.
Frustratingly patchy
The four-time European champions navigated the winter with an 11-match winning run, but there wasn’t a queue of people lined up to congratulate attack coach Tyler Bleyendaal for the calibre of their play.
Instead, there was regular criticism that the Leinster attack was frustratingly patchy compared to how it used to purr, especially when Stuart Lancaster was responsible.
This fuelled the consensus that too many of the players Andy Farrell took with him on the British and Irish Lions tour were struggling to pick up the thread and find their form since returning from Australia.
This was a bone of contention across the Autumn Nations Series where Ireland failed to fire in the losses to New Zealand and South Africa, and it’s a topic that has now been reheated following their Stade de France mishap.
The Ireland attack coach is Andrew Goodman, who stepped up from the Leinster fold to succeed Mike Catt, who exited in the summer of 2024, and his promptings have yet to properly click.
Ireland’s attack only began to construct in Paris when reinforcements arrived from the bench and it left D’Arcy, the retired 84-cap midfielder who toured twice with the British and Irish Lions, making an eye-catching observation.
“The Ulster lads looked more comfortable keeping the ball alive,” he suggested in his latest Irish Times column. “And when Jack Crowley (of Munster) came on, it seemed to give Sam Prendergast a bit of a kick-start to play with more freedom. That tells me the players can do it; just not often enough.”
Explaining this alleged lack of freedom, he singled out a first-half incident. “There was one passage in the first half from a (Caelan) Doris offload where players froze. They’re looking at each other, going what now? That’s a problem right there.
“The talk about playing what’s in front of you was completely absent. You can’t just switch that on like a tap. You can’t drill a rigid structure into players for weeks and then expect them to suddenly improvise when it matters.”
D’Arcy’s summary read: “The Irish attack lacked confidence. Our kicking game was desperately poor, or at least the decision-making on when to kick and when to run. At times we were kicking off positive gain line ball, the exact moments when defences are less organised, when mismatches are available if you’re willing to take them.
“Our launch attacks from the lineout were poorly executed, save for a few bright carries around the tail. We got hit behind the starting point, and had to kick off slow, static ball. What’s the plan here? We’re kicking off the back foot; we’re kicking off the front foot. There’s no coherent strategy.”
So what went wrong? D’Arcy called out the lack of form that had too many players playing without instinct. “Form is a double-edged sword,” he wrote.
“When you’re picked on form, you arrive in camp knowing the coaches believe in you because of what you’ve been doing. You come in confident and that creates momentum.
“When you’re selected despite being out of form, or worse, when the game plan doesn’t use or include what you’re good at, the opposite happens. You second-guess everything. You look for the safe option, freeze and ignore your instinct to play in those moments.
“Stu McCloskey got the ball with proper momentum once. Jacob Stockdale got one pass and beat three players. Why pick them if you’re going to largely ignore their attributes?
“Considering the amount of time Ireland put boot to ball, I was disappointed by how disjointed the kick chase was, how we reacted. France got to our kicks before we did, turned defence into attack, hurt us. We couldn’t do the same. That’s the basics – work-rate, awareness and reading the game.”
Ireland’s defeat in France prompted talk of a generational slump, that Farrell’s side is finished as a serious hitter on the world stage. D’Arcy, though, didn’t go that far in his criticism, believing the team’s situation is fixable.
“It’s not all doom and gloom,” he concluded, looking ahead to the remainder of Ireland’s campaign, which includes fixtures against Italy in Dublin next Saturday followed by England in London on February 21. “What’s missing is clarity in attack, the courage to back players to make decisions in the moment.”
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