Hardly any great surprise that the Ireland changing room had all the gaiety of a grave digger’s after a Test where they were well beaten. Andy Farrell reckoned the silence and downcast mood was the best summation of a game that was nowhere near as close as expected.
“I thought we prepped well and trained well and were excited about the game but we didn’t manage it the way we wanted, obviously, and the opposition had a big say in that,” Farrell said.
“It’s a funny old feeling because we don’t tend to have it [disappointment at home] in our dressing room but it is what it is. That’s life. Congratulations to New Zealand and we’ll move on. We have to find solutions as soon as we possibly can because there’s a hungry side in Argentina who are playing some really good rugby at this moment in time. We need to get back on the horse and get going again, don’t we?”
The captain, Caelan Doris, said he thought the team had turned a corner around the break, having closed the gap at the end of the first half and then gone ahead early in the second. “We were happy with the start of the second half – that was the message at half-time, that we hadn’t really fired a shot,” he said. “But we got momentum back in the second half but our discipline gave them entry and possession in that second half. I felt pretty good at half-time and backed our fitness and the way we’d trained. It’s obviously pretty taxing defending against a team like that.”
With that, the penalty count motored on against Ireland. “It’s not right to be desperate chasing your tails when you’ve made an error whether it be a penalty or a dropped ball and to compound that error with another error and suddenly field position is gone.
“We did that a number of times and we need to fix our mentality as far as that’s concerned. We became a little too desperate and on the back of that the energy wasn’t what was needed – or the accuracy.”
The only downside for New Zealand was the first-half incident when the captain, Scott Barrett, had a go at Joe McCarthy.
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“They play hard – they’re a great team – a physical team with ball in hand but it was just the one moment,” Barrett said. “I was getting up from a ruck and from where I saw it Damian [McKenzie] was on the ground and I think Joe cleaned him up, so … from where I saw it, it was around his head. Whether it was or not I’m not too sure but I guess I took exception to that in that moment. It looked like a bit of shoulder to a man on the ground who’s our 10.”
