IRELAND VICE-CAPTAIN Peter O’Mahony said he and his team-mates are not panicking in the wake of Saturday’s comprehensive defeat to England.
O’Mahony stressed that the loss on home soil hurt but underlined his belief that Ireland can still win the Six Nations this year.
“Absolutely,” said the Cork man when asked if Joe Schmidt’s side can bounce back to earn a championship success in the coming weeks.
“I don’t know why we would be panicking.
“You know, we’ve been sitting here for a long time now and it’s been all positive, this and that, but we were up against one of the best teams in the world and we got beaten, and we’re certainly not going to shy away from that.
“We’re hurting. The Aviva is a place where we haven’t lost in a while. You never like losing, no matter if you are playing for Ireland or your club but particularly at the Aviva which is somewhere we have made a fortress. Certainly, that hurts.
“The beauty of our job is that, bar the last game of a campaign, you can get back out if you are given a shot, work hard and train hard during the week for the opportunity to put that right. I’m certainly not going to sit here and say it didn’t hurt. It did, but we can’t be sitting around here feeling sorry for ourselves.”
Ireland have the opportunity to show their true quality against Scotland on Saturday in Murrayfield, where Schmidt’s side lost on their last visit in 2017.
O’Mahony said Ireland won’t be looking to reinvent the wheel after last weekend’s disappointment.
“We’ve got to get back to the things we do well,” said O’Mahony. “We’ve reviewed them and they’re the areas that we’re going to go to base our performance on this weekend.
“We’re certainly not going to throw all the game plan out of the window and start fresh, or start with something new.
“We’ve built a squad and a game plan for a long, long time now and we certainly won’t be going away from it.
“We just need to realise how important the stuff that we do well for our game is.”
Speaking on Saturday night, Schmidt had indicated that he felt Ireland had been “bullied,” although O’Mahony didn’t quite go along with the idea that he and his team-mates were beaten up by England.
“Look, at the end of the day you are coming up against one of the best teams in the world regardless of world ranking,” said O’Mahony.
“You look at the quality England had before and we do a lot of video work, we come up against some of the best individuals in the world. When they fire well they are difficult to stop. We certainly weren’t happy with some of the areas of our game.
“Some of our strong points that we base our game around, we didn’t fire a lot of times, which is disappointing. But it was probably a combination of those factors of England playing very well and us not living up to our own standard in areas that we normally do.”
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