Eddie O’Sullivan isn’t in the business of keeping people happy.
His is the business of telling the truth.
Ireland bulldozed their way over a World Number 20 ranked Russia on Thursday morning in Kobe, Japan and former manager Eddie O’Sullivan, to put it lightly, wasn’t all that bowled over by what he’d seen.
And that’s how it is.
O’Sullivan saw Ireland stutter and struggle. Didn’t see creativity bar the odd spark and with all of this coming against a team who are back boned by amateur rugby players, it was quite simply to Eddie’s eyes, ‘a terrible performance.’
“They didn’t put them to the sword,” he began on RTÉ alongside a more complimentary Jamie Heaslip and Brent Pope.
“To be honest it was like watching paint dry most of it. We had these sparks but this, against a bunch of amateurs where we eked out two tries at the very end of it – the last of them coming in the 76th minute when these lads are just dead on their feet. They played a quarter of the game with 14 men…Let’s just call this what it is lads, it’s a terrible performance. We should have been putting these lads away but 50 points…”
And it’s hard to argue with that.
Eddie O'Sullivan laying it out 👇 pic.twitter.com/azo7XjVyL4
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) October 3, 2019
Ireland did get the job done. But they were 1/200 to get the job done. They did get the bonus point, but if they didn’t get the bonus point then it would have been crisis time.
Ireland didn’t build much momentum in this performance and that’s why Eddie is worried.
“The positives, yeah, we got the bonus but there’s nothing else there, zero. The guys who had a chance to put pressure on the coach, to put their hands up, they didn’t really put up their hand. When you play a team like Russia, if you can’t stand out – an ordinary performance isn’t good enough, you have to light it up. And I didn’t see anyone lighting it up to be honest…”
“It was head down, stagnant rugby…When teams front up to us physically, everything shuts down.”
Jamie Heaslip: Heaslip: Other teams have caught up with our way of playing… but anything goes in knockout rugby #IREvRUS pic.twitter.com/sCqOKSElog
— RTÉ Rugby (@RTErugby) October 3, 2019
“We don’t have momentum. We have anything but momentum…We didn’t get any momentum out of today…If you’re looking for evidence, it’s not evident to me…”
Heaslip and Pope took a more positive angle, praising O’Mahony and Ruddock in particular but Eddie wasn’t budging.
