Hard work paying off for Ireland

Ireland head to Edinburgh this weekend and it’s my favourite time of the rugby year. I’ve always loved the Six Nations and it was certainly the highlight of the season when I was playing. The autumn internationals are great but they’re one-off encounters. The Six Nations brings with it a sense of tradition and history, away days in great rugby cities, fans mingling for days either side of the match and – most importantly – there’s a trophy to be won at the end of it all.

Scotland are first up and like every game of rugby that’s ever been played, the battle will start up front, where we’re probably in as healthy a state as we’ve ever been. Sean Cronin’s injury leaves us a little shy of experience behind Rory Best at hooker but we’re in great shape in the props and the back five will be full of serious operators. In the back row, CJ Stander has been great for Munster, Jamie Heaslip is playing as well as ever, Josh van der Flier has been brilliant for Ireland, Sean O’Brien is back, Peter O’Mahony is back ... at least one of those players won’t be in the match-day 23 and it’s a great position to be in.

The strength of the Ireland squad has improved dramatically over the past couple of years and it’s no accident. We were short of props for years but the IRFU did what any good company would do: invested in potential and got the coaches on board to make sure the potential was realised. We’ve had young fellas in training camps and the academies being put through their paces for the last five or six years and now we’re seeing the benefits.

Scotland’s main threat probably comes in the backs. If Stuart Hogg is given space, as we saw when we played them in Dublin last year, he’s a dangerous player. One loose kick went his way in the Aviva, he looked up, saw Rory Best and Mike Ross in the middle of the field and didn’t wait for a second invitation to smoke straight through the two of them for a great try under the posts.

Another threat is Jonny Gray but with the amount of analysis that’s done these days, the Irish players will know him better than he knows himself. The players will have all the stats on the number of offloads he attempts, how many times he carries the ball, which hand he likes to carry it in – and they’ll be waiting for him.

On our side, I’m looking forward to seeing Garry Ringrose in action. He showed glimpses last year and is ready for the big stage. Every time he gets the ball, it looks like something is going to happen. He has the footwork, he has the vision and he’s well able to take care of himself too. He ducks under tackles, keeps moving and is capable of beating three or four lads even in the tightest of spaces. He’s a natural talent.

The training camp this week will be full of players trying to impress but you don’t want to overdo it. There’s no point being wound up on Tuesday and drained on Saturday. You have to peak for the game. The players all wear GPS units in their jerseys in training these days and you can measure how far everybody has run and how fast they were going in the sprints – but they won’t tell you what’s going on in a lad’s head. Each player knows what works best for them in getting the balance right during the week and that comes with experience. It’s why the likes of Ringrose are brought into the training camp a year before they’re ready to play, so they can see what the week is like and adjust to it properly when they’re in the squad for real.

I always tried to stay calm early on in match week. You’d have a good idea of how everyone was feeling about the game in training on Tuesday. Lads would have a day off then on Wednesday and do their own thing. I always took that as an opportunity to get home for a while and get away from it all. Some lads would go off shopping or into town for the day but that would probably have wound me up more.

We got off to a slow start in last year’s tournament but that was probably down to a number of injuries and the poor form of the provinces in the build-up to the Six Nations. We’ve seen some great talent emerge since. We had a first win in South Africa last summer with young players to the fore and we topped off the year by beating New Zealand in Chicago. Leinster and Munster have qualified for the knockout stages of Europe so their players will be buzzing in camp. Irish rugby is on a high.

The win over New Zealand is significant for a number of reasons. We’re the only team to have beaten them in the past 20 months or so and that will fill our players with huge confidence. However, it also puts a giant X on our backs. We’re a bigger scalp now. Scotland have never beaten New Zealand. They probably didn’t enjoy watching us leave them with that unwanted record and they will be keen to take us down a peg or two.

It also puts us as the firmest of favourites and although that hasn’t always served us well, this Ireland side doesn’t think that way. They’ll know as much as anyone could possibly know about the opposition. And it’s not just a case of the props knowing their opposite numbers. Every player is presented with stats on all of their opponents and are expected to put in the hours and know their games inside out. If you don’t do that side of the job, you don’t play. It’s a formula that works. It worked in Chicago and there’s no reason to think it won’t work in Murrayfield. They’ve done the homework; now it’s time for the test. CL