Ireland secures Six Nations title as England loses to France
- by Derrick Holloway
- in World
- — Mar 13, 2018
"We play Ireland next year in the Six Nations and we will play them in 18 months at the World Cup and we need to make sure we are a better team when we play them".
"With every team, you never play the flawless game", he explained.
- Overall Ireland have won their last 11 Test matches, a new record for them.
"I haven't played there before so it would be pretty special to go to what is an incredible stadium with 80-odd thousand people".
"Every team is fallible and every team has a weakness and certain strengths and, at the moment, teams are outplaying us in certain areas of the game and we have to learn from it". That was the difference: we played well, we didn't take our chances. "It's weird again because we won it watching a game over which we didn't have any control over but we managed to control enough of the things that we were involved with to get the 19 points on the table that we needed".
As good as we've been, it won't be good enough against England.
"On the other side, there's always something with every team, you never play the ideal game, maybe you're trying to do that so there's always fixes - definitely with this group, with the experience, the new guys coming in, the younger generation that have added so much, there's something there, there's another level that we're striving towards".
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It's important to take, as much as possible, an unbiased and autonomous view on how Ireland have performed since they lost to Wales at the Principality Stadium previous year to really get an understanding of where this team now stands and where they could potentially end up.
Sean Cronin's fourth could be decisive and means England need to score at least four tries in winning in the day's late kick-off.
"This is incredibly tough to do and the opportunity that exists next week is really precious", said Schmidt. We've got to fix it because that's the sort of rugby we're playing.
The importance of the matchday 23 in the modern game can not be underestimated, with Stander acknowledging: "I think (the replacements) have got a job to do as they get on". "That's going to be a tough game". It's probably something they looked on and how they can come into the game and improve it. "Only Rob (Kearney) and Rory (Best) are left that have done a Slam and we can start talking about it now, because that's what's in front of us if things go well".
"Totally different", he said when asked if he saw similarities between the two games.
France had little to offer other than thunderous defence, yet England lacked the intelligence, discipline and physicality to overcome their limited hosts. "It is about as much as possible trying to treat it like another game".
