Contepomi will look beyond the scoreboard in Ireland clash at Aviva
While his side have pulled off some big victories in the current calendar year, Felipe Contepomi has says his primary focus is on performances rather than results ahead of Friday’s game against Ireland in the Aviva Stadium.
A former player and assistant coach with Leinster, Contepomi took over as Pumas supremo from Michael Cheika in the wake of last year’s Rugby World Cup in France – where the South American nation achieved a fourth-place finish. The Buenos Aires native is currently 10 games into his reign and in addition to getting the better of France in a summer test international, he also guided his country to impressive triumphs over world champions South Africa, New Zealand and Australia over the course of an eventful campaign in the Rugby Championship.
Contepomi is hoping his charges can build on a 50-18 success over Italy last weekend ahead of his return to these shores, but stressed that he will look beyond the scoreboard at the end of the game.
“We evaluate maybe different to how people from the outside evaluate us. I know you go a lot on results, we go more on performance and we have certain things that we look at that it doesn’t matter about results,” Contepomi remarked from a press conference at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Stillorgan earlier today.
“I give you a very simple example, we beat South Africa in Santiago [del Estero] but it came up to the last minute where [Mannie] Libbok missed a penalty. What if he would have got that penalty? Would that have changed our way of evaluating ourselves? No, we don’t change the way we evaluate ourselves.
“Now from the outside, you change the evaluation because you say, ‘oh you beat the double world champions’. For us it’s the same, how we evaluate. The way we evaluate, we know we are in progress because the things we say we are going to do, we are doing them more frequently than not on game day.”
Argentina’s team to face Ireland in the Aviva on Friday shows three changes from the one that overcame Italy last Saturday – Pablo Matera, Guido Petti and Matías Moroni are drafted in to replace Santiago Grondona, Franco Molina and Matías Orlando respectively.
Despite crossing the whitewash as a second half replacement in the Italian game, Connacht’s Santiago Cordero has been left out of the match day 23 for their showdown with the Irish. Although he has had his struggles with injury since joining the westerners in the summer of 2023, Contepomi said that Cordero’s absence is merely a selection call on his behalf.
“No, he’s not injured. Actually, he’s in great form. He had a great game last weekend. We know we can count on him and he’s really training really well, but we made other selections. It’s more tactical around strategy, [Santiago] Carreras has come back and we think he can give us something from the bench,” Contepomi added.
Ireland name their team for the game this afternoon.
Juan Cruz Mallia; Rodrigo Isgro, Lucio Cinti, Matias Moroni, Bautista Delguy; Tomas Albornoz, Gonzalo Bertranou; Thomas Gallo, Julián Montoya, Joel Sclavi; Guido Petti, Pedro Rubiolo; Pablo Matera, Juan Martin Gonzalez, Joaquin Oviedo.
Ignacio Ruiz, Ignacio Calles, Francisco Kodela Gomez, Franco Molina, Santiago Grondona, Gonzalo Garcia, Santiago Carreras, Justo Piccardo.