“It’s nothing that we didn’t expect. Australia are an unbelievably athletic and talented team.”
Joe Schmidt looked understandably crestfallen after Ireland lost the opening game of their three-Test series against Australia, in Brisbane.
Ireland led 9-8 after the hour mark but ran out of considerable steam in the final quarter and lost 18-9. David Pocock and Israel Folau were superb for the Wallabies while there was the lesser-spotted sight, in recent years anyway, of an Irish scrum under the pump and conceding penalties.
Schmidt was unhappy with what he believed was the Australian pack wheeling that late scrum – with the resulting penalty putting them 11-9 ahead – and with match officials not asking if there was any reason not to award a try to CJ Stander when he went close in the 43rd minute.
Stander himself spoke of Ireland giving ‘a few young guys’ a chance in the First Test but Jack McGrath [28], John Ryan [29], Rob Herring [28], Jordi Murphy [27] and Robbie Henshaw [24] were five of the six changes Schmidt made to his side. The sixth was 22-year-old Joey Carbery and he certainly fit the ‘young guy’ bill.
Carbery was drafted in for only his third Test start at outhalf and he acquitted himself well without setting the Suncorp pitch alight. Samu Kerevi, Pocock and Michael Hooper all laid into him with crunching tackles but on he played. He won’t be happy with a second half penalty miss but did make amends on the 58th minute to leave the fray with his team one point ahead.
Asked, post-match, about Carbery’s performance, Schmidt had some kind words sprinkled in with a critique on a couple of failings. He said:
“I thought Joey was pretty solid, really. He came off the pitch at 9-8 and that’s not a bad return for a young man who is really starting his first big Tier One Test match.
“He really out a lot of work in to his preparation during the week. He’ll be disappointed with the goal-kick that he didn’t get as it was a reasonably comfortable angle for him. That could have given us a little more of a comfort zone and applied a bit more pressure on the Wallabies.
“But I thought his tackle quality was good and his distribution was generally good. He put a couple of guys into a little bit of space… missed a couple of passes. Just that pressure of time, and certainly Australia were giving us as little as possible. They were all over us at times.”
Schmidt and is coaching staff have clearly come to Australia with the intention of giving some players a better taste of Test rugby at the pointy end and the head coach insists he will not veer far from his original game-plan.
“I don’t think we can afford to change some of the plans we got,” he said. “We’ve just got 11 Test matches to go before the [2019] World Cup… we now need to give the guys [we are interested in] the opportunity.
“We can’t be caught with guys who don’t have that experience and they aven’t been in that white-hot atmosphere of playing big teams and being in that whole furnace of being pressed for time and space like we were tonight.”
