Ireland U-20 Reaction

We gave them an early foothold in the game, which is the one thing we didn’t want to do. We kinda dominated possession in the first 15 to 20 minutes, but they got two breakaway tries and that kinda put us under pressure.

I thought the lads took their foot off the pedal a bit towards the end of the first half. at half-time we refocused and I thought we had done enough (to win), but in fairness to Italy, they deserved it because they stayed in the game, they got their chance and they took it, and their guy got their conversion.

Obviously disappointed but a lot to learn from that game.

next step –

Recover first, mentally recover first. The guys will physically recover over the next day, we’ll sit down tomorrow morning and have a good review of the game. Look at what we did well – we did some good stuff in the second half – and we were pretty average at times in the first half, we’ll have to learn from that and look at how we can do better against Scotland because we know Scotland are a serious team and they were pretty sharp today against New Zealand, so another big challenge again on Sunday.

Ciaran Frawley –

It was a tough miss. He had just nailed the previous one to get us (six points) ahead. That’s the way the game goes. He was unlucky, he struck it pretty well so when you strike it well and it doesn’t go over, that’s all your can do.

We hold nothing against Ciaran, we left enough chances behind us to win that game ourselves. It’s a 15-man game, a 28-man squad, and coaches and management all have to take responsibility.

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Jack Kelly –

We’ve certainly made it harder on ourselves now. t’s just about how quickly we turn our focus to the next game, we’re just going to concentrate on our recovery, we’ll do our review and get that game out of the way and focus on the next two.

You can’t really win games just on patches of good play. We had concentrated on getting out there, keeping the ball in our hands and building into the game. They kinda got the jump on us, we didn’t really execute our game-plan well in the first half.

The second half we came out feeling great, there was some good shape and we were running in some nice tries. I suppose we didn’t keep it on them long enough and we let it go down to the very last minute.

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bonus points will start to matter from now and we just have to concentrate on getting an 80-minute performance against Scotland