There are two Irish rugby supporter camps to be in this week. One of them thinks this Irish rugby team are not good enough and last Sunday in the Olympic Stadium showed up their deficiencies and why they cannot contend at the business end of this World Cup. The performance was flat, devoid of attacking ideas, very one-dimensional and our pack was ineffective, never dominating.

Furthermore, we flattered to deceive against Romania and Canada, there is no master plan to do with timing our run, Ireland are once again under-cooked at a World Cup. This school of thought was given plenty of ammunition.

The glass half-full camp thinks that the Italians delivered their best display in years and this was their World Cup final. They played brilliantly, Joe Schmidt is still saving his best team and strategies for France, this was a game that was only about winning. Come next Sunday in Cardiff, we will set fire to our World Cup campaign and the shackles will be removed. Oh, and Schmidt is a coaching genius. That school of thought is bordering on the delusional.

Gut feeling

I am living in another camp altogether. It is between the two. The gut feeling is that Ireland were under-done for Sunday. Spies in the camp report the mood on the team bus going to the game was far too tense and senior players and management detected a flatness in the hour or two before the kickoff. By then there was little they could do only trust in the men selected and the work they had done.

The facts of London were that we were lucky. If Peter O’Mahony hadn’t made that tackle then we would have gone behind and I’m not sure we could have turned that around. The negatives were obvious for all to see and the first of those was Ireland’s predictability. We were far too easy to defend against.

On the Schmidt debate, I’d be of the opinion that the team played to a fairly unambitious game plan as dictated by management. That order, by the way, was not designed to have us holding on and looking for the final whistle in a one-score game. No, I’d suspect the strategy was to dominate the Italians in the set pieces while racking up the odd try, plenty of kickable penalties and winning with much more in hand but still saving something for the French.

While we are not the most expansive team in rugby to begin with, we are usually one of the most effective and on Sunday we struggled to make breaks, we struggled with our usually reliable rolling maul and we kicked relentlessly, mostly to no good effect.

Our opposition did surprise with their intensity and here Ireland have few excuses. We were second best in the aggression stakes. It wasn’t hard to see that this was the Italians big day and with Parisse back they would throw everything at us.

Real surprise

The real surprise was that they kept that up for 80 minutes. A team like Ireland should be clearly superior in the last 10 to 15 minutes of a game against opposition ranked ten places behind us in the world rankings. That bothers me most about the game. The longer it went on, the worse we became.

So we do have issues. This is not part of any grand plan.

The positives, apart from winning, were few. But we have some more heading to Cardiff. We still have two more games guaranteed and all eggs will be in those baskets. A fit Rob Kearney comes straight back into the team at full back, Jared Payne goes back beside Henshaw in the centre and I’d be having Keith Earls on one wing with Tommy Bowe on the other.

Clearly our half back partnership is untouchable, but we’d like to see more of its creative instincts at work in the Millennium Stadium, a happy hunting ground for us.

Cian Healy’s ball carrying ability probably gets him the start against France. Iain Henderson looks to have also done enough for a jersey at the off in the second row.

I doubt Schmidt will pull any other rabbits out of his hat, the possibility of Sean O’Brien or Jamie Heaslip being dropped for Henderson or Chris Henry would be a sign of panic, although both might be on a shorter leash come Sunday.

How Ireland look to play with the ball in hand should become clear very early in this game. I’ll be looking for some attempted ingenuity in the first 10 to 15 minutes. We must have more in our locker than simply kicking a high ball down the French throats and hoping Tommy Bowe or Rob Kearney gather it, allowing us to do the same again.

We will be moving the ball because the likely Gallic centre pairing of Fofana and Basteraud might be huge, but they are not the quickest defenders. Their outhalf is Freddie Michelak, for whom the word mercurial could have been invented. He must be attacked at every available opportunity because he’s not the type of player that recovers from a poor start. Like most outhalves, he isn’t the soundest tackler.

Henshaw and Payne have the strength and cutting edge to make breaks in the 10/12/13 channels, Sexton has the hands and brain to make the pass that makes that possible. Earls and Bowe are finishers given a quarter of a chance. We must unleash them. This is something we might be saving for Sunday. Our pack cannot be as tame as they were against Italy. The intensity needed at this level, allied to the legal aggression the top teams must have in their armoury, must be evident from the first hits. That’s the marker our pack must put down at the first ruck, maul, lineout and scrum.

We got a wakeup call last weekend. We have been warned and we got away with it. That happens to good teams now and again. And we haven’t gone away you know.

Here come the two biggest weekends in our rugby playing history and all is not lost. There is always hope. And it is justified. Join my camp.