MALLEYMAN

‘The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good. Watch how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.’ – Samuel Johnson.

July 18th, 9am vs Cook Islands – Lost 13-6

Cook Islands are clearly the second best team in our group behind New Zealand but they didn’t take this match, or us, seriously enough to start with and we went two-nil up. I loved how we were playing against them. At one point my pod came sweeping on from the box at their mids, I scooped at the mid who made the touch on fifth, took him a couple of steps shortside then stepped back into the hole between the mids. This is your standard go-to pattern coming out of the box and they weren’t defending it well. The other mid stepped in, a little sinker pass over his head to my midfield partner Gareth and we score. Even good players can be made to look bad if their work rate is not up to standard. From an attacking point of view, for our pod it’s beginning to come for us now in fits and starts.

At half-time it was 6-5 to them. Their skill levels were beyond ours but it speaks well about our team that we had the ability to execute on the opportunities they were giving us. In the second half they did get their act together and pulled away. Compared to playing New Zealand, I felt almost comfortable against them a lot of the time and then not quite at other times. It’s really hitting me how little high-level game time I’ve had in the build-up to this tournament, not nearly enough. I feel like I’m making slow progress during this tournament. I’d be happy to keep playing two games a day, with everything that entails, every day for the next month.

A final match-note. Our pod had just subbed off and we were debriefing in the box. Arsene Wenger-style, I completely missed the most notable incident of the game.

This is the story as I heard it. One of the Cook lads pushes our girl link Eimear, from my home county of Laois, to the ground in a hard, aggressive touch. This is not great but it can happen in games happening at high speed. However, he then betrays that there was intent to his action by saying something to her as she lies on the ground along the lines of ‘And you can stay down!’ Our nearest Irish boy link Toby (lovely fella) naturally takes exception to this, rushes in and pushes the Cook lad. Toby did say after he was kind of hoping the Cook lad would push him back but, as he doesn’t, the initial penalty to us is reversed and the Cook lad is merely warned while Toby is sin-binned. The best bit – at some point in all this, Eimear’s father, pure Laois, comes running on to stand up for his daughter and has to be escorted off the pitch. Proper GAA stuff.

I like how our team behaved. It’s good to stand up for teammates.

July 18th, 12.20 vs Scotland – Lost 9-2

This was the big one we had to win to make the quarter finals. They were favourites coming into it based on previous results but we had a definite chance. We never managed to give ourselves that chance. Paul O’Connell used to talk about Ireland shrinking as a team in World Cups rather than expanding as teams like Argentina seemed to do. I think we shrank a bit as a team in this game. They played close to the best version of themselves and we got nowhere near that.

My memory of this game is that physically it was the hardest game we played. Their middles seemed to be coming at us at speed from every angle every time they subbed on from the box. We lost the energy battle and sometimes that’s more important than technical aspects.

The game did include one epic moment from me when I drove towards our box with the ball and for some inexplicable reason kept running out over the sideline.

That’s what being under pressure will do for you. I got sucked into playing a game I didn’t really want to play with attackers flying at us off box moves. When they’re scooping through the middle of you at speed, you’re gone. We got what we deserved in terms of how we played and a bit less than that in terms of who we are.

TOP GUNS

I have to confess, I’m not a fan of Touch. My mother asked me today if I’ll miss the tournament once it’s over. I’ll miss the intensity, the challenge of getting up for every game, of testing myself and pushing through the self-doubt, coping with the lows, striving to compete, to be better, to be of use to my team. I won’t particularly miss hanging around Touch. It’s fine but I don’t find it that interesting. For example, if I look towards the Australian Touch tent, I think they’re really good at Touch. That’s it. Credit for that. They may or may not be better sportspeople. Culturally, it’s not where my interest lies. If I knew some of them, I’d have more to say. I find how people view Australian or New Zealander Touch players a bit like how men consistently overestimate the intelligence of attractive women over less attractive ones.

Dr. Christmas Jones, Nuclear Physicist ‘The World Is Not Enough‘

Of the people I do know, I am a fan of some teams. Others leave me cold. Some irritate me.

There’s one team which are having a relatively unsuccessful tournament. I have little sympathy for them and take a kind of relish in their lack of success because it’s earned. That’s the brutality of top level sport. Proper preparation is not just to do with hard work, it’s to do with intelligent work, and humility, and self-awareness.

There’s another team which are having a very successful tournament. But I wouldn’t want to play for them either. I don’t know what they stand for, what idea, what identity, what values they are exemplifying. There’s a player on the team I’ve heard jokingly compared to Tom Cruise in terms of his charisma. I feel like I’m covered in snakeoil after talking to him. I no more want to talk to him than I do the real Tom Cruise. And you can tell Tom I said that.

There’s another team which has had a relatively unsuccessful tournament and it’s earned. But I have nothing but sympathy for them. I can see the spirit and effort, the emotion, how much they all care. I would love to play with them or help them out in some way.

The quality of Touch that teams produce is not always indicative of the quality of people within those teams. And sometimes it is. Knobs do prosper sometimes. And so do the uninteresting. But generally, sport is blindly cruel, which is another way to say that you get what you deserve. I love that about it.

Is an Australian team better than an Irish team? In terms of the Touch it produces, absolutely. In terms of the people it produces, that has a more nuanced answer. If you’re on that better team and are not aware of that second part, you’ve already lost me. It’s tricky to remember and that’s why my inclination is not to look towards the Australian tent but elsewhere.

July 19th 8am vs Italy – Won 6-5

This was the last of our group games. We were slight favourites for this game based on results but Italy had also defeated Chile who beat us.

The night before the game, we got fifteen clips of video analysing Italy from our coach, Mikey. I was watching them after midnight in bed. I love that level of detail, it’s one of the things I’ve enjoyed most about being part of this team. Even if we haven’t been able to implement all, or enough, of the information that’s coming our way, it still doesn’t change its quality.

Italy weren’t great and neither were we. We struggled and stumbled and we stayed together as a team.

I played slightly better again. It’s been very slow progress upwards for me during this tournament. I still messed up letting in one try and slipped for another that I should have stopped.

I did have one scoop and run through, racing past ‘Antoine Dupont’.

It should have been a score but unfortunately my teammate Paul put the ball down before the line and even more unfortunately for him, there is visual evidence of it!

Another line attack below where it should have been a score. It’s those little details. The 13 is the right defensive mid in the picture below, I set up the quickie on the left mid.

My mid partner James should have been running that hole outside the 13 below rather than wrapping behind me. But it was our first game to play mids together. I also should have dragged the mid in the white hat out farther short side to begin with and challenged him there.

These are the learnings you’re trying to do with new combinations in the two or three line attacks you get in an international game. Emily is the one player I’ve actually played with before. I love having her on the far wing, she does the right thing nearly every time and she did politely point out that the long pass was still open to her if I’d seen it in the example above. I didn’t see it.

The important thing is that we won. We came from 5-4 down and I’m happy for the people in this team. We did it together. I was so happy for us to get another win. We needed it.

July 20th 4.05pm vs Cayman Islands – Lost 9-3

This game for me was reflective of our tournament, the good and the bad. They are a very competent team, certainly in attack, but there were lots of ways we could have won it. You can’t win it if you go 3-0 down in the first few minutes. You have to find a way, any way, not to let that happen. That’s what winning teams do. It shows the inexperience of our team at this level. Counting how many international debutants we have in our team, it’s definitely over half the squad. Myself and Emily are the only ones who’ve played in a world cup before.

Personally, I did some serious analysis of Cayman the night before. They had recordings of two of their games and I was going through their attacking moves over and over. Players tend to have predictable habits (me included). For their main playmaking middles, they tended to run quickie set ups with some version of:

That bald middle I later found out was Irish and from a famous Irish rugby family, a brother of ex-international scrumhalf Peter Stringer. My best guess is that he was the one on the far right in the picture below, but who knows? They all look alike!

In the game I could see the attack moves coming before they happened. This is by a distance the best game I’ve played defensively in the tournament. It’s the first game I felt fully up to speed in my movement and footwork around the line and felt on top of everything thrown at us. One of my highlights of the whole tournament was us holding them out for three sets with only five players after my middle partner Gareth had been (harshly?) sinbinned.

I tried to trash talk the middle with the hat at one point. I’m not good at trash talk, my heart isn’t in it. It has barely any impact on me when opponents do it to me. It registers like an annoying buzzing sound in the background and just makes me like the opponent less. Do they honestly think they could say anything that would make me feel as bad I can make myself feel if I mess up? You barely scratch the surface.

Part of trash talking is cultural. It’s not really part of Irish sport, certainly not in a positive sense as part of the banter. Once in a social touch game in Ireland, we only had five players against a squad of ten and we held them out for ages but eventually they started to pull away from us. A New Zealander on the other side started trash talking us when they scored. I stared straight at him and said in my stern, teacher voice ‘Cop yourself on and show some dignity. You’re playing against five players, you idiot.’ He just kind of looked down to the ground as if he was ashamed. I met him subsequently, lovely gentle, funny lad. I wasn’t playing the trash talk game as he understood it and vice versa.

Anyway, I tried to trash talk the hat after they ran a Pete Walters’ special, a Waikato move.

I could see it coming from way off. They passed to the link to make the dump, the hat was going to scoop back infield from dummy half and drag me with him. I just pretended to go with him and when he passed back to the link, I’m there to make the touch. As I’m running back past him, I say ‘Nice move. I watched it all in the videos.’ I meant it to get inside his head, that I knew exactly what they were running, but I think he probably just heard ‘Nice move’ and it came across as a compliment. He thanked me at the end of the game saying how nice it was to play against me. Anyway, I tried.

And they won. Fair play to them. They deserved it.

‘When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.’ – Friedrich Nietzsche

We’re all tired by this stage and it’s time to reflect. That’s all for the matches. A full review of the tournament to come in a couple of days.