Six Nations preview: Ireland v Wales

SCOTLAND’S Six Nations squad trained at St Andrews, the home of golf, Wales opted for a week in Gdansk, the home of Poland’s Solidarity Union, Lech Walesa and several sizeable shipyards that are still building ferries for the Western Isles. Hey, it works for Wales.

Warren Gatland put his team’s excellence in New Zealand down to fitness as much as anything else, so his squad went cold turkey all over again, complete with cryotherapy chambers set at a bracing -120°C, which is somehow appropriate. Relations with Ireland have been a tad frosty ever since the Kiwi coach insisted that Welsh players disliked the Irish more than anyone else.

Still no amount of cold therapy treatment will bring any of Wales’ injured players back. Gatland is already missing one-third of his preferred starting XV including the twin locks, Alun Wyn Jones and Luke Charteris, flanker Dan Lydiate, Lions’ prop Gethin Jenkins, sometime skipper Matt Rees. That list of the missing doesn’t include Shane Williams, who has retired from Test rugby, and midfield duo Rhys Priestland and Jamie Roberts were only passed fit to play on Friday.

For their part, Ireland would claim that they are missing just as much star quality from their own 22-man squad, since it doesn’t include the injured Brian O’Driscoll. The Irish backs look a lot less incisive as a result, although they could hardly look less threatening than they did when losing the World Cup quarter-final to Wales in New Zealand.

That result is the elephant in the room today, the planet that this match revolves around. Wales’ surprise win that day still hurts. It meant that Ireland, alone amongst the senior rugby nations, have yet to appear in the semi-finals of the World Cup. If the result was not exactly a heart-stopping shock, at least not to the fans in red shirts, the overwhelming manner of the 22-10 loss left the Irish with red faces. Wales nullified Ireland’s bullocking breakaways by taking them out at the ankles. Not even Jamie Heaslip can work up a head of steam with Sam Warburton holding on to both his feet.

So, has the big Irish No 8 recovered from that World Cup disappointment?

“You guys [the media] have been dwelling on it, that it’s been 12 weeks. For us there has been a lot of rugby since then. The World Cup is a bit of an afterthought,” he says.

It was actually 17 weeks ago but Heaslip can be forgiven the mistake given how much has happened in the intervening period.

Leinster, Ulster and Munster have all qualified for the Heineken Cup quarter-finals, while Wales’ only representatives are the Blues and they won’t relish their trip to Dublin. Of course, if European form was all-embracing we could award the honours to Ireland now without the messy business of actually playing this Test match. Thankfully, rugby has an unruly way of messing up the smartest of theories and the Irish eight is taking nothing for granted.

“The difference [between Heineken Cup and Six Nations] is not the intensity or the skill or the standard that it’s played at,” argues Heaslip. “It’s more the execution and by that I mean, if you look at our last international against Wales, in the first half we were on their line and we probably had two, three opportunities that were really good opportunities to score a try but we didn’t execute.

“Maybe in a Heineken Cup you get four, five, six opportunities. We get ourselves back in the game then, at the start of the second half – two mistakes, two tries and they control the game. That’s the difference as opposed to if you make two mistakes in Heineken Cup you might only be punished for one. It’s still not quite there with that. That’s the main difference. Aside from that, the standard of the European Cup is very much the same.

“Not that you step up your game. It’s pretty sad if you’re only stepping it up the occasional times, you should set your own standards for training and playing and adhere to them as opposed to what other people put on top of you. My gut feeling is we have our own standards regardless of what team we’re playing and you can see that in the way Ireland has developed over the last ten years as a professional outfit.”

Heaslip and the rest of the merry men clad in green may be sitting comfortably in the box seats but Ireland are painfully aware that the Welsh, for all their call-offs, have the class to hurt them, especially in the back row of the scrum. Warburton, Toby Faletau and Ryan Jones, a handy enough stand-in for Lydiate this afternoon, are class acts. The Welsh breakaways out-thought the Irish last time they met and will look to do the same again this afternoon.

“They’re a good auld unit,” Heaslip concedes. “They divide up their work very well. The three of them get through a lot of work. They’ve got good carriers, they’ve got good defenders, they can mess up a lot of ruck ball and slow it down so we just have pay them a little bit of attention.”

Heaslip and the rest of the home squad won’t underestimate Wales again, they know the consequences of that all too well, and they should finish comfortably ahead this afternoon.

If they do, the win may offer some relief but any sense of redemption will have to wait until the 2015 World Cup.