Iain Henderson confident Ireland can clinch South Africa series

Although Iain Henderson was obliged to watch the last nine minutes of Saturday's second Test in Ellis Park from the sidelines after being replaced, he has bucked prevailing views by absolving the replacements of blame and maintains that Ireland's mistakes in the last quarter are both readily identifiable and easily fixable.

Henderson, who is likely to return to the second-row for next Saturday’s series decider here in Port Elizabeth, said: “I think a lot of the lapses in concentration weren’t necessarily from the guys who came off the bench. I thought a lot of the guys who came off the bench did a sterling job when they came on.

“Unfortunately I think you could put it down to three, maybe, three individual lapses. Three individual pinpoint lapses, where they managed to take their opportunity very well.”

“In the first game we didn’t give them the opportunities to get their claws into us but then they took their opportunities in the second Test and fair play to them. They managed to convert those into points which we did well in the first Test not to let them do.”

Few lapses

For this reason, Henderson is not inclined to attribute the second-half turnaround to the Boks going through the gears, more

Ireland

dropping down the gears.

“No, no, I don’t think I felt that at all. I think we all knew that when we came off. You could have asked everyone what they did wrong and everyone would have told you exactly the same thing,” said Henderson, specifically highlighting how Ireland became a little narrower in defence.

“There were a few lapses in that second half where we got sucked in. They played wide ball and got good space on the edges. I don’t think they did anything outrageously special that we can’t cope with. I don’t think we need to go back to the drawing board and try to reinvent everything that we do. I just think we need to be more dialled in and make sure that we stay lapse-free for 80 minutes.”

Henderson also concedes that the tide had begun to turn before his departure, with tries by Warren Whiteley and Pieter-Steph du Toit in the space of six minutes having trimmed Ireland's 26-10 lead to 26-22 when he left the fray.

He also accepted culpability and maintained Monday’s review was not especially painful.

“No, no, no, not at all. Like I said, you could have come off the pitch and everyone knew.

“Like, for example, off one of our kick-offs, we played a couple of phases and then it came back and I missed a clean-out on Straussy and they got a penalty out of that and then went down and ended up scoring a minute or two later.”

Different things

“That’s what I’ll go back and look at. If I hadn’t have missed that clean-out, we mightn’t have got done, or if Straussy hadn’t had got poached or if

Conor Murray

had have hit me in that pass, Straussy might have had two clean-outs.

“There’s so many different things you can go back to. But everyone has their little things they know they have to go back to and rectify or realise where they’ve gone wrong and we can rectify them for the third Test.”

So, while being conscious of where they made mistakes and, as Conor Murray said earlier in the week, feeling a degree of anger at themselves for not closing the deal can be motivating, at some point they have to park the one that got way.

“I hate to keep on saying it, it’s a cliché, but we’re a forward-thinking team. We have to take the next step. We don’t get ahead of ourselves and take it moment by moment, so come the weekend, as a team we’ll understand that we can’t be saying: ‘Oh we did this last weekend’. It will be a more decisive focus amongst the team, I think.

The Boks have seemingly turned a corner, and despite losing players such as Duane Vermeulen, as the performances of the aforementioned Whitely and the debutant Ruan Cumbrinck show, this may not necessarily weaken their hand.

“I just heard they’ve got a couple of injuries but that just gives an opportunity to their players. We’ve seen a few new caps playing extremely well for them.

“South Africa’s a big rugby nation and they’ll want to impress in front of a home crowd.”

But Henderson was keener to talk up Ireland’s ability to improve. “Look, we know where we went wrong and we know where we can put it right. I don’t see any reason why we can’t go out there and do a job again and do it just as well, if not better than in the first Test.”