FEW CONSENSUSES CAN be formed in the immediate aftermath of a game as wild as Ireland’s seven-point defeat to the Springboks.
Were Ireland bad, indifferent, or actually kind of good? Is it really in the best interest of rugby as a piece of sporting theatre for the TMO to intervene on an infraction so granular as Rónan Kelleher’s in the lead-up to James Lowe’s try? With a second test to come next Saturday, did the Boks’ one-score win at Loftus Versfeld actually settle anything?
A lot of it will remain subjective until it’s run through the wash of written analysis pieces and podcasts and group-chat discussion in the coming days — and probably still afterwards.
From an Irish perspective, though, some objective truths:
Craig Casey deputised capably for Ireland’s most influential attacking player and proved himself ready to play ball at this level.
Depth at loosehead is a serious problem with no clear solution in sight.
And Caelan Doris is back to being an absolute menace.
The Leinster back row was decidedly Ireland’s best player in Pretoria, leading from the front long before taking the reins as captain from Peter O’Mahony early in the second half.
The stark reality is that, in Ireland’s two most recent defeats before today, Doris was eclipsed by All Black Ardie Savea at the World Cup and Ben Earl of England during the Six Nations. Even more recently at club level, Cameron Hanekom was the outstanding eight on the field as the Bulls ended Leinster’s season.
But back at Loftus three weeks later, the Mayo man bucked that worrying drift before it could become a trend.
Had this been a game of Red Rover, the Ballina native would have been the only man left standing on the Irish side when the dust settled. This was Doris back to his ballistic best as a ball-carrier, less ‘footwork into contact’ and more ‘I hope you have an emergency contact.’
On a day when it otherwise seemed virtually unobtainable in the face of feral Springbok resistance, the 26-year-old provided Ireland with semi-regular go-forward ball.
Doris looked for possession. His teammates looked for Doris.
On the defensive side of the ball, too, Doris played with a maniacal intensity: aside from his umpteen crunching tackles, he won two of Ireland’s three breakdown turnovers.
The second was key in that it allowed Ireland to go in at the break just a score down. The first led to a sequence emblematic of the problems that plagued Ireland throughout the contest, as Doris excavated the ball back to the Irish side only for them to lose it forward before they had a chance to transition.
And while this was hardly a coming-of-age display for a player who has been capable of similar since he first represented his country four years ago, it felt seminal for the extent to which Ireland became reliant on Doris to take the wheel as the bus threatened to careen off a cliff’s edge.
In that sense, it was a reminder as to why Andy Farrell identified Doris as Ireland’s next skipper, ahead even of his provincial co-captains James Ryan and Garry Ringrose whose respective influences off the bench in Pretoria were significant in their own right.
Peter O’Mahony’s performance was equally a reminder that the baton will be passed sooner rather than later, and probably by O’Mahony’s own hand.
It won’t be long before his online critics begin to compare Ireland captain O’Mahony to Joe Biden, particularly after watching him get bounced — pretty much twice in the same carry — by his former Munster teammate Damian de Allende. What they’ll neglect to mention is that Ireland had to shorten their lineout, and it still went to absolute pot, without both O’Mahony and Dan Sheehan in the second half.
Should you ever wish to understand O’Mahony’s value to this Ireland team, ask a player with no provincial allegiance to the Cork man: on or off the record, they’ll tell you in no uncertain terms that, aside from his still-world-class lineout ability and his being a crucial cog on both sides of the maul, O’Mahony is the universally popular, spiritual leader of this group of men. He makes other players’ jobs easier, particularly around the set-piece. He makes other players better, be it with a kick up the hole or an arm around the shoulder.
But it is also time to acknowledge that, for a ‘big moments’ test player, O’Mahony’s big moments these days happen fewer and further between than before.
If O’Mahony wasn’t in athletic decline, there’d be something seriously wrong: he’s almost 35 years of age and for nearly 30 of those years, he has used his body with such recklessness that his fossil remains will one day bewilder palaeontologists. That he has required only two shoulder reconstruction surgeries should be listed in the ‘Honours’ section of his Wikipedia page when he does eventually hang his boots up.
Who knows? Maybe having his old pal De Allende bounce off those shoulders this evening might have edged O’Mahony closer towards making that call, at test level at least. Or maybe it’ll provoke the kind of response from O’Mahony next Saturday that will energise his teammates with a kind of infectious belligerence. It could do both.
But O’Mahony has for years followed rugby religiously even outside of work hours and he’ll know as well as anyone that there are very few blindsides of his physical profile still flourishing at the top end of the international game in 2024.
And just as O’Mahony took the keys from Sexton, he’ll hand them to Doris who, on today’s basis, looks ready again to reel off years’ worth of big moments of his own.
As he stressed himself earlier this season, Doris still has massive scope for improvement when it comes to interacting with officials. Luke Pearce is, by modern-day refereeing standards, a patient man and Ireland’s stand-in captain had him driven demented within 10 minutes of taking over from O’Mahony at Loftus.
That’ll come only with time in the saddle. Performances like today’s will look after the rest.
