It’s unreasonable to expect Jack Crowley fit in from minute one but having Stuart McCloskey outside will help greatly – writes One F in Foley
Stuart McCloskey is Ireland’s in-form player and 60/1 to be Man of the Match today…if Ireland win the first-centre, most likely, will have been the best player on the pitch (Image: ©INPHO/Billy Stickland)
Andy Farrell’s problems begin and end today with England, there is no harm in being short-sighted, a win at Twickenham is hard to find.It is particularly tough away from home at two venues in this competition.The hard-learned lessons of the spectacle of Stade de France/Parc des Prince/Stade Colombes, the wonder of France, seemed to have dissipated ahead of the opening game.Memories of Marseille, Sexton’s DG, BOD’s hat-trick seemed to have propagated an idea that this was somewhere Ireland could bring a flask of tea and almond cakes. To wit ‘Where your f**king trepidation?’Because there should also being a healthy respect, touching trepidation, about entering the Twickenham arena.That’s not least, this time around, as Ireland have yet to hit anything approaching expected form this season.The brightest spots being beating France 14-7 in the last quarter (!) and holding Italy to three second-half points while putting 15 points on the board to nip by and win.It would be unreasonable to expect Jack Crowley to simply fit in from minute one but having Stuart McCloskey outside him will help greatly; Rugby doesn’t do protective bodyguards but if they did…The front-row battle will be interesting, Ellis Genge, Luke Cowan-Dickie and Joe Heyes comes across as hairy-bikers en bloc.
They are tough stuff, gruff, rough, all of those sorta ideas – none will be beating defenders on mazy runs to the line.The caution here is that we don’t fully know what happened against Italy in the scrum.And it was surprising to hear Farrell, taking of the Irish front-row, use the phrase ‘given their wings’, an extremely derogative phrase when used in rugby changing rooms up and down the country.If Ireland front-row starts to flail it would mean big trouble.
But, to double down, Jeremy Loughman has been excellent at loose-head to here, Dan Sheehan is a big man at scrum time (and he has not lost a lineout across his two games) while the National Treasure, Tadhg Furlong, returns to the starting line-up.
Ireland should be okay but there is that niggling worry about people being ‘given their wings’ last time out.This comes with the observation that the broadsword England second-row will be one to watch; Maro Itojo and Ollie Chessum are the best second-row in the competition and will have to be fought blow by blow.It was hard to measure England against Wales, there was just too much running around and smiley, jolly rugby being played, Sevens at times.Moreover, the Scots made a helluva lot of noise about their win over England at Murrayfield.That is they managed to beat an England side down to 14 men for 30 minutes, that had a back-row on the wing for the last 20 minutes, and who were gifted a Keystone Cops try from a 70m drop-kick blockdown.Winning by 11 points wasn’t quite the Jacobite (Bonnie Prince Charlie etc) ideal of the honest men from Skye coming to lead Scotland to complete destruction of the sassenach.Rather this was a Tartan team that had been leaderless when losing the week before to Italy, who took full heart from a good start and, backed by their passionate, fans held the lead.Don’t listen to those writing them off yet. Same of Ireland. Interesting encounter, I’d say.