Rugby Union: Ashton puts mischief on Irish agenda

Irish rugby has been saddled with all manner of knee-jerk descriptions down the years. On a good day, it is always passionate, fierce or frenzied; on a bad day, of which there have been rather more, the vogue words range from naive and primitive to downright incompetent.

Few, however, have accused the Irish of over-complication. When Ciaran Fitzgerald launched his spell of captaincy in the early 1980s by holding up a ball and telling his squad: "This, fellas, is what it's all about," a colleague allegedly cried out: "Hold on there, skip. You're going too fast for us."

Under the circumstances, then, it comes as something of a shock to be told that Brian Ashton's priority on agreeing to join the Irish as coaching adviser was to simplify their entire approach to the international game. A certain Mr Fitzgerald might be surprised to hear that in Ashton's view, there was too much of the Einstein about his new charges and not enough of the Murphy.

"Don't laugh, but he took us back down to basics," says David Corkery, the bruisingly hard blind-side flanker who did as much as any Irishman to nip the latest Welsh renaissance in the bud in Cardiff a week ago last Saturday and, in the process, set up a humdinger of a rumble with the English in Dublin tomorrow. "You know, before Brian arrived we had 15 different back-row moves and so many line-out calls that you could only calculate them in multiples of 10. Now we have three or four of each. He just walked in, introduced himself and cut everything back by about two-thirds.

"It's made a big difference, definitely. It stands to reason that the fewer set moves and calls you go on to the field with, the easier it is to know exactly what you're meant to be doing in any given situation. I've been very impressed with the clarity of Brian's approach; he's easy to get on with, but there are strong ideas in that head of his."

Before taking up a full-time coaching post at Bath last summer, Ashton spent long enough as a schoolmaster to conclude that the best communicators are those who carry their learning lightly. There is no earthly point in knowing everything about a subject, be it astro-physics or rugby union, if your students end up being blinded by science. According to the Irish players, the new teacher is not the sort to disappear into his own textbook.

Yet in his private moments at home in Bruton, Somerset, the 49-year-old Lancastrian - a league aficionado by upbringing but a good enough union scrum-half to tour Australia with England in 1975 - is as earnest and scholarly as the most diligent academic. "When I flew back to England after the Ireland-France game [his first in his new capacity], I did so armed with every piece of rugby minutiae imaginable: videos, statistical breakdowns, fitness reports, analysis charts, anything that might give me more information on the players. I watched and read for two days solid." Had Ashton chosen NASA rather than rugby, man would have walked on Mars years ago.

The attention to detail is phenomenal. After the victory over Wales, Ashton revealed that he had spotted a possible weakness in the play of Neil Jenkins, the opposition full-back who had played virtually all his rugby at outside-half. "Work on his left side," he told his players. "He's not yet comfortable there. He can be exposed." That precision marks him out as a very different animal to Jack Rowell, his partner of six wildly successful years at Bath between 1989 and 1994 and the man he must out- think if Ireland are to cause a second successive upset at Lansdowne Road tomorrow.

Although he appreciates the dynamics of scrum and line-out better than anyone, Rowell likes to paint with a broader brush. Given that England's man-to-man advantage over Ireland is almost total, he can afford to; thanks to improving standards in the Courage League, which allow skill levels to take care of themselves, England's coach will now be spending his time and energy on getting the indefinables - attitude, focus, confidence - absolutely right.

By contrast, Ashton is engaged in searching for more cases of Neil's Left Side.

The obvious worry for Rowell is that his rival understands more about the likes of Phil de Glanville or Jon Sleightholme and the things that make them tick than anyone in the England set-up, De Glanville and Sleightholme included. "I feel quite mischievous about that," admits Ashton, who, with far less first-hand knowledge at his disposal, constructed a tactical plan sufficiently sophisticated to lure a gifted Welsh back division up any number of self-defeating culs-de-sac in Cardiff.

"Let's get this in perspective, though," he says. "At the moment, we've won one game. By a point. The players know they are still in the middle of a fairly bad trot and while I can see potential there, the amount of work still to be done is considerable. The positive thing is that they have shown themselves capable of putting a plan into operation and sticking to it. They did it for an hour against France, at which point they were leading, and they did it for the full 80 against Wales."

Ashton is too much of a realist to confidently predict an Irish victory, but he does expect to see another 80 minutes of undiluted concentration. Genial he may be, but as Corkery says: "For all his talk of freedom of expression and the rest, he is very hot indeed on responsibility, both individual and collective. After all the work we put in against Wales, it would have been criminal to lose. And believe me, Brian would have made us feel like criminals, had we done so."