Ireland’s World Cup campaign starts Saturday against the lowly Canadians, but don’t let their ranking fool you into thinking the Canucks are a soft touch.
We’re a few days away yet from knowing Joe Schmidt’s side for the opener against Canada, but it’s unlikely the team will be taking the field without Munster’s Peter O’Mahony leading the charge.
The forward may not be in Stephen Ferris’s first XV but, having recovered from a worrying hand injury suffered against Wales at the Aviva, he’s flying fit ahead of the clash with the Canadians and hoping to start in Cardiff on Saturday.
The Corkman’s birthday falls on Friday, but instead of blowing out candles, the still 25 year old has warned his teammates to expect a massive physical battle from Canada.
O’Mahony captained the last Irish team to face the Canucks, in 2013, when Ireland were on tour and he’s expecting a massive physical contest,
“Certainly in the back-row, guys like John Moonlight, Nanyak Dala and Aaron Carpenter who has 60/70 caps and is hugely experienced. Guys who we would have played against two-years again when we toured there.”
“They came out all guns blazing and we expected it. I don’t think we’re going to expect anything differently at the weekend.”
“Hugely physical, and I think to be fair to them they are all particularly good athletes from one to 15.”
“Even on the bench guys like Phil Mack the scrum-half, hugely elusive, a very dangerous runner around the breakdown. So we’ll really have to have our heads screwed on and have our homework done.
Canada’s most well known rugby player is of course Jamie “Cuddles” Cudmore, who has had a few runs with various Irish players over the years, most notably Paul O’Connell.
O’Mahony has also come across the Clermont man while on duty at provincial level and he admits the second row is a very dangerous customer,
“I’m not 100 per cent sure how many caps he has for Clermont but he has a high number of first-class games under his belt, he’s a very experienced player. Hugely physical, I’ve played against him a couple of times and he really drives Clermont’s pack.
“He’s a real go-to guy for them and I’d imagine he’s the same for Canada. He’s someone that we’ve looked at hard and someone that we’ll have to pay a huge amount of respect to on Saturday.”
Ireland’s discipline has been good to the point of angelic under Joe Schmidt, but there is an expectation that Canada, and Romania, will look to unsettle Ireland by getting under their skin and trying underhand tactics to disrupt the Six Nations champions. O’Mahony is confident Ireland will not respond to any potential provocation from their opponents.
“Look, it’s something that we don’t have any interest in. You’ve seen it over the last two years. I don’t think we can focus on that kind of thing and to be fair I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
“Both teams will have too much at stake and too much to worry about, and will be purely focused on the match. We’ll worry about implementing our gameplan, and stopping a very good Canadian side.”
Ireland’s warm up games mixed the good with the very bad but O’Mahony feels the Irish squad are in a good place going into the World Cup.
The Corkman says the side needed the four hard games and that the mood in the camp is positive.
“I think we’ve a lot of areas to cover, we’ve had four important Tests and tough Tests. We’ve plenty to work on but the good thing is there’s been a real edge to training.
“It’s a bit different for us we haven’t travelled yet, there’s a lot of teams there already.
“But you can see it’s a World Cup week just by the attitude to training, and we’ve got through a lot of very good work that we needed to do, so it’s been good.”
