IRELAND WILL HOPE to channel the lingering hurt and anger from last weekend into a much-improved performance against Scotland at Murrayfield tomorrow afternoon, as Joe Schmidt’s side bid to avoid back-to-back Six Nations defeats for the first time in three years.
The defending Grand Slam champions completed their preparations for Saturday’s round two clash in Edinburgh this morning, at the end of a difficult week for Schmidt and his players.
Rory Best speaks to his team-mates after today’s captain’s run. Source: Dan Sheridan/INPHO
With the benefit of hindsight, captain Rory Best admits the dressing room was uncharacteristically quiet in the build-up to last Saturday’s humbling home loss to England, but keen to learn from their mistakes, there has been a greater intensity and edge in preparations for Scotland.
Ireland know their Six Nations title defence now hangs in the balance in the Scottish capital.
“We were very disappointed with the result and parts of the performance last week,” Best said at Murrayfield this afternoon. “We’ve worked very hard on looking at how we can improve and how we need to improve because we’ve looked at the Scots and how dangerous they are.
“Look, we’re going to have to produce something significantly better than last week. But that’s always the goal for us and we fell down last week but it doesn’t mean we throw everything out and attempt to start again.
“We’ve built a lot of things over the last number of years and it’s times like this where you have to stick to what you know. You just ask a little bit more individually from the players to produce something collectively with a few players coming in who didn’t play last week.
“They’ll be looking to make a point that they should have been involved last week. We have to make sure we get our things right because if we produce something similar, the Scots are a great team and they’ve shown us that as recently here as two years ago.”
Asked specifically about last weekend’s no-show against Eddie Jones’ side, Best admitted Ireland were guilty of making mistakes during the warm-up, and that filtered into their performance.
“You can pick on a couple of things in hindsight,” the Ulster hooker continued. “Sometimes you get so fixated with making sure that you know where to go that you become a little hesitant.
“You sensed it more before the game than the Friday. Friday is a strange day, there’s a little bit of lightheartedness, a bit of training, a bit of giddiness so close to a big game. It’s hard to read into that. Joe probably has a better handle of that.
“Before the game I thought we were quite quiet. We’re a relatively quiet bunch anyway bar a couple. Peter (O’Mahony), Johnny (Sexton) and myself are that bit more vocal.