Former Ireland fly-half and Crusaders assistant coach Ronan O’Gara has said that Ireland’s efficiency at the ruck should lead to a lot of points scored against New Zealand this weekend.
The All Blacks come to Dublin off the back of a one-point win against England last weekend and will look to extend their winning streak in Europe to 21 games when they face Joe Schmidt’s side in Dublin on Saturday.
Ireland put 40 points on the two-time defending world champions when they sealed their maiden win over the All Blacks in Chicago in 2016, before scoring just nine points against them in Dublin two weeks later, but O’Gara envisions a high scoring game when the two sides meet this weekend.
“You realise now that you’re probably going to have to score 20 points to beat them,” O’Gara said on the latest episode of Baz and Andrew’s House of Rugby.
“New Zealand are good enough to score 20 points and the way the game is refereed favours the team in possession. The way Ireland play, they’re so good around the ruck and they’re so disciplined, that they will score a lot of points. It probably comes down to can they withhold the wave of New Zealand attacks.
“By putting pressure on them I think they can. The Lions tour was probably a big learning point for New Zealand. They have a lot of respect for how northern hemisphere teams defend and there are probably more opportunities to beat them than there has been in the past.”
Former Ulster winger Andrew Trimble said that Ireland head coach Joe Schmidt will look at Ireland’s discipline and line-out as two areas that will need to be addressed following the 28-17 win over Argentina at the weekend.
Ronan O’Gara is encouraging Irish rugby fans to #AnswerIrelandsCall during the Guinness Series to be in with a chance of winning tickets to the big Test matches.“Penalty count will be one,” said Trimble. It’s strange to see an Irish side give away so many penalties. I don’t know what the penalty count was but it just looked like we were unnecessarily giving away the occasional soft penalty and we just coughed up the ball a little bit.
“Defensively I thought we were pretty sound. A few big, heavy Argentinian ball carriers. We looked reasonably sound. Scrum was pretty good. Line-out was fairly good as well at times. It recovered well.
“There were one or two scrums and one or two line-outs where they got good ball and if they got access on their first phase then Ireland were chasing their tail.
“Whereas if you stem that, and make the ball a little bit untidy as we did at a couple of scrums and a couple of line-outs, then they don’t get that ascendancy and they don’t get over the gainline.
“Argentina just got really narrow and then they just said let’s put it up in the air. They got a bit of joy there.”
