Captain returns for painful truth

Six Nations Championship: In the aftermath of what proved to be Warren Gatland's last match in charge in the defeat to New Zealand, no one spoke with more frustrated anger about a missed opportunity than Keith Wood and no one believed more passionately that Ireland could and should be aiming higher. Having watched three poor performances in a row, no one tried to raise Ireland's performance level higher on Saturday than Wood, and so, at the end, most likely no one hurt more.

"Physically, at this stage I'm about ready to go to bed," Wood said after his third game in four months.

But the general decline of Ireland this season would have hurt far, far more. Leaning wearily against a wall in the tunnel outside the dressing-rooms, Wood almost whispered as he reluctantly accepted that Ireland's campaign had seen them make a step backwards rather than forward.

"We had a better season last season than this season, but we still won our three home games which we have to take a lot from. We haven't played as well as we would like to have played, but we'll look at that and get it better. There'll be new guys hopefully ready to come into the squad to bolster the squad. We've a great opportunity with a tour in the summer and if we get our situations right we'll be okay.

"We didn't play well but we'll have a really, really hard look at that, and everything has to be geared now to the World Cup.

"It's a bit of a kick-start when you don't perform like today," added Wood. "The other teams are progressing at a ferocious rate and we need to make that same progression. There's a lot of talk about rugby being very, very good in Ireland but it has to get better. We can never be content with how the provinces have gone.

"In a lot of ways it's an all or nothing situation, we just have to put every possible resource we can to try and get the best out of us."

For all his defiant talk, there could be no escaping the clear evidence that Ireland's forward play particularly has become seriously flawed, and not only is no one better positioned to appreciate that than the hooker, Wood is also the player who will have the biggest influence in reviving that forward play.

"I do think there are things we have to take a radical look at. We are, I suppose, playing on the standards we've set for the last three or four years.. We didn't function well today. We were under a lot of pressure in the scrum today, but anybody would be under pressure against that French scrum today. Anybody."

As for the lineouts, Wood admitted: "I take some of the blame today, I threw a couple of bad ones. But at times we weren't necessarily on the same wavelength either. They were where we were. We have to have a hard look at that."

Asked to evaluate Ireland's Six Nations campaign, Eddie O'Sullivan shifted uneasily and admitted: "You're obviously disappointed after losing two of your away matches to England and France, so you would say, 'yeah, disappointed with those performances'. But after all they were the two top teams away from home.

"Our performances at home have been sufficient to win three home matches. People might disagree but I'm happy with that. But I suppose the disappointing thing is that we did lose badly and you have to accept that. They're games that we didn't really compete in and I think that's a worry for us certainly."

In his first day in office, O'Sullivan spoke enthusiastically of his desire to "raise the bar" but increasingly he has been obliged to temper those words, and on Saturday he re-iterated what has become a more common refrain.

"It's a sobering experience when you lose a game by 40 points, you can't step back from that. But I believe I'm realistic enough to know that when we are competing with the top teams Irish rugby has to get everything right to compete, and when we have days like today, where things go wrong for us, we're really struggling.

"That's the reality of it. It's a fact of life, and when we get a good day out against the top teams and things go right for us on the day certainly we're in there. But we're never going to beat these teams by a point or two anyway on a good day, and when it goes bad, it can go very bad."