THE SENSE OF frustration was clear on Andy Farrell’s face before he had uttered a single word in his post-match press conference. 

His first game as Lions head coach, being played at home in Dublin, ended in a 28-24 defeat to a sparkling Argentina team. Test or no test, this was not the tour launch he expected from his players.

“Honestly, losing hurts, especially in this jersey,” Farrell said.

“So we need to find the solutions pretty quickly and be honest with ourselves. There has to be some good come from this.”

His disappointment was sourced in a disconnected team display, Farrell describing some of the attacking play as ‘clunky’ and highlighting issues around the lineout and breakdown.

“We made it a tough game, didn’t we? Obviously the first and appropriate thing to say is congratulations to Argentina, they thoroughly deserved to win the Test match. They capitalised very well on the back of quite few errors from us. Congratulations to them. I’m sure that’s a big moment in Argentinean history.”

The obvious ‘out’, if he wanted to reach for it, is that this group have been only been together for two weeks, and some of the squad only arrived into camp earlier this week. 

“Oh no. I wouldn’t give that excuse. We need to do better than that. It is what it is. The Lions players, good players coming together, of course we ask a lot of them, and maybe we put too much pressure on the side because it certainly looked like we was a little bit disconnected at times.

“Look, we’ll review what we said was was going to own, and then we need to make sure that we get something positive from that because it’s all about how we move forward.

There are no excuses, we should have been better today, more accurate today, but as with other areas of the game, we’ll learn and get better together.”

The Lions fly to Australia tomorrow morning and their next assignment is a date with the Western Force the following Saturday. A full week to address to holes in this opening performance and start working toward the type of display that will be needed to topple the Wallabies.

“Obviously (we need) a better all-round performance. You can single out one thing but it’s not just one thing, it’s a compounding of quite a few bits. The amount of balls that we threw blindly, either to the opposition or the floor, is probably a stand-out. If you combine that with the kicking game and the aerial battle and what is disappointing is scraps on the floor from that type of battle, it always seemed to go to Argentina so there’s a bit of fight and hunger from them that we can’t accept.

“Then you combine stuff at the breakdown, the lineout or whatever, and it’s too much. It’s too much when it all comes together, it’s just compounded, and there’s a reason why people do get cramp or look a bit tired or are not able to capitalise on opportunities you have created, because probably subconsciously you’re suppressing yourself with the compounding of errors. It obviously needs to be addressed.

“We’re not sugar-coating anything because we need to be honest because if we’re not honest how do we gain trust with each other,” he added.

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“We have to say it as it is. There are certain things we said we were going to do and we need to own that and review that properly.”