What we’ve got coming up next week, you can’t afford to wallow too long.
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Tipuric toured Australia with the British and Irish Lions in 2013 along with O’Brien and Heaslip, but stressed that no thought had been given to making Warren Gatland’s squad for this summer’s tour to New Zealand. Little offloads, discipline, those sorts of things throughout the 80 minutes that we could control, and we did that today.
One area where Wales made life very hard for Ireland was in the lineout, where Best saw three of his throws from touch pinched, twice by his fellow 2013 British and Irish Lion Alun Wyn Jones.
Ireland would have a mathematical chance of winning the championship if Scotland defeat England at Twickenham and then lost at home to Italy, but Schmidt is focusing on finishing in the top half of the table.
Johnny Sexton is one point away from becoming the seventh player to reach 300 points in the Five/Six Nations, and the second Irishman after Ronan O’Gara.
Ireland head coach Joe Schmidt: “Some of what we didn’t do so well against France, we must do better against Wales”.
It could have been worse for Ireland had Dan Biggar been successful with a drop-goal attempt.
“As far as I am concerned, when you are taking part in global rugby as a player, as a coach, you are under constant pressure”.
“We’ve played here at the World Cup with the roof closed, so we know how loud it’s going to get, the France game was very loud and the quarter-final particularly”. With Sexton off again, this time in the sin bin, Alun Wyn Jones set up the maul, Rhys Webb timed his run to perfection and North went over in the right corner.
“No player likes being on the bench and you try and do your best for the team”.
But just as Ireland looked to be fading, they found more energy and redoubled their efforts, trailing 15-6. If the national team doesn’t succeed, you are going to get a fair bit of flak, and that’s life. I really admired the way the team clawed their way back. “We want him on the ball as much as possible”. In each half we got the maul going and then undid ourselves effectively.
“We’ve just got to be at our best in whatever they throw at us, and just have that level of composure when we’ve got the ball, and the accuracy as well”.
“We definitely owed the fans a win, and credit to the support we had as well”. Now we have a reasonable level of consistency but on our off days we just make a couple of unforced errors.
“We are in a goldfish bowl in Wales, and you are aware of it”.
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“Their back row is really intense at the breakdown and we will have to deal with the battle in that area first”, admitted Carre.
