Murray Kinsella reports from London
THERE IS RARELY too much time in a World Cup campaign to fix things, even if the solution seems obvious.
For Ireland, a week out from the important Pool D meeting with France, the need for improvement is all the greater.
“We got the win, we are into a quarter final,” said hooker Rory Best after yesterday’s game. “They were backed into a corner and came out firing. We need to be better but we know we can be better.
“We’ll regroup, take a long, hard look at the match and then park it. We’ll look at how we are going to beat France and how we are going to build on the performance. A couple of mistakes don’t make us a bad side.”
Best is a key leader in the Ireland squad and though Paul O’Connell deservedly gets the major plaudits, the hooker will be hammering home key messages to his teammates this week.
“Every now and again I think it does no harm to be brought back down to earth and Italy definitely did that today,” said Best.
“We know that when we get things right then we’re very good. When you don’t get things right at this level then really the gap isn’t a big one to bridge. Italy really put it up to us and put us under pressure.”
Best is always honest and considered in his words post-match and there was nothing different at Olympic Park.
We understand, there’s a lot of players that are used to playing big games and big games back to back. For us, it’ll be ‘let’s learn the lessons from this and make sure we’re better next week,’” said Best of Ireland.
“We’ve a seven-day turnaround to ramp things up and get ready, we talked about this game being the start of a big build-up and the World Cup really starts now.
“We’ve got past this game, it’s important we improve over the next two weeks if we want to do anything.”
