Hope yet for injured O'Driscoll

Obeying doctor's orders and resting up in his room for Saturday evening, Brian O'Driscoll's dead leg improved significantly overnight and the Irish medical and management staff are now more optimistic that the Blackrock centre will be fit for consideration for this Saturday's Test in Brisbane. And if fit, there'll be little consideration about it.

The gifted 20-year-old has been by some distance the pick of the Irish midfield. Indeed, it says something about his performances out here (and of his team-mates in the second-half in Saturday's 3924 defeat to New South Wales) that the squad's non-playing members again voted him their "man of the match" for the second game running on tour. And this despite barely playing for 40 minutes on Saturday, and all but about 15 of them with a dead leg.

However, the problem for Warren Gatland is that ideally, for a match of this magnitude, the coach wants his starting XV partaking fully in training by Wednesday at the latest. That starting line-up will be revealed to the players before tomorrow's training session on the Gold Coast and made public afterwards. Of the other walking wounded, Victor Costello's ankle injury has also improved significantly, and likewise David Corkery's back spasm, although Trevor Brennan will require more treatment today for his strained shoulder ligaments.

Gatland drew some solace in his ability to play a stronger hand this week, and suggested there would be four or five changes, or perhaps as many as half a dozen. If Costello is fit, then his ball-carrying strengths are likely to be employed at number eight, with Dion O'Cuinneagain reverting to more of a roving role from number six. Keith Wood and Peter Clohessy will probably come into the front row, with Tom Tierney and David Humphreys restored at half-back.

Matt Mostyn's third successive try-scoring appearance (he now has five in three games) in the green pushes him closer to a first cap while the second row may now come under closer scrutiny given Malcolm O'Kelly's trouble free reaction to his first game since having a shoulder operation.

Paddy Johns, meanwhile, looks like a player suffering a mental hangover after losing the captaincy and displaying a physical reaction to Saracens's hectic late-season push for Europe. Utilising Trevor Brennan as a lock must now be a bigger runner than it was.

Not surprisingly, Gatland wore this defeat badly and could scarcely conceal his frustration with some of his big name players.

Reflecting, on the "stupid things" and "silly penalties which just seem to be par for the course," Gatland added: "The other thing I was a little bit disappointed with was that a couple of pretty well-recognised players who you might have expected to have big games and who were quite quiet out there."

He let it hang, almost menacingly, without naming names, but clearly his frustration was directed at the likes of Paul Wallace, Johns and Jeremy Davidson.

Undoubtedly, Gatland had a valid point when claiming that in a Super 12-type environment, such as Saturday's game, scorelines between the same teams can swing by 25 or 30 points in a week.

"We've just got to take the positives out of this display and look at chewing up some of the errors that were costly for us.

"I thought there was some lovely handling and some nice stuff created. They kept going for 80 minutes as well. I was disappointed with the scoreline. You can't deny that some of the tries they scored were excellent and we weren't able, at this stage, to cope with defending it.

"The disappointing thing was our defence, and it's a defence that in the past has worked. We'll just have to have a look. If you were just watching the replays on the screen, there you can see a couple of players not being aggressive enough in terms of getting up and just being caught out."

The New South Wales full back, Matt Burke, inching his way back to his former self but still retaining his class (not once did he turn the ball over), unprompted, warned his fellow Australians: "If the Wallabies think that next week is going to be a runover, I think they'll be rudely surprised.

"They (Ireland) are a strong team. They're very physical. When you go and play a Test team after a provincial team you obviously go up 10 notches. All I can say to those guys (the Wallabies) is `get ready' because they (Ireland) will be on fire next week; especially coming off a loss." He admitted that the tries came a tad easily once they read Ireland's defensive system.

"I'm sure they (Ireland) will go back and watch videos, and I'm sure they'll adjust a little bit. I mean, they'll be competitive and strong next week."