Ireland's lethargic starts are a puzzle

At least the wounds suffered by Ireland on Sunday were more mental than physical. With Brian O'Driscoll and Peter Stringer expected to resume full training next Monday in readiness for Saturday week's Six Nations encounter with England at Croke Park, the only concern arising from the exhausting set-to with France was what appears a minor ankle injury to Ronan O'Gara.

"Ronan has a bit of an ankle problem," said Eddie O'Sullivan. "We don't know what happened, he must have gone over on it or got a knock on it late in the game and last night at the meal it swelled up quite a bit. But we're confident that it's nothing sinister, it's just a knock and other than that everyone is good."

Ireland's planned training session today was cancelled to allow for further rehabilitation and Sunday's replacements, along with Isaac Boss, will be released to their provinces for selection in the Magners Celtic League this weekend, while the in-house post-mortem into the 20-17 defeat to France began in eranest.

Asked if there was one area of the Irish performance he would like to improve above all others, O'Sullivan responded: "Probably two to be honest. One would be the start of the game, not starting the game on the back foot and let the opposition come at us and then have to absorb all that pressure and then try to get into the game. Part of it is getting off the defensive line earlier in the game and throwing down a marker defensively and not sitting back and waiting to see what they do; just getting off our line and knocking people over.

"Once we do that our game seems to tick pretty well. We need to do that earlier in the game and probably an aspect of our game that we tend not to get right is our starting 10-15 minutes. We tend to give the opposition a better start than us and then we've got to start the engine 15 minutes into the game and let it pick up."

This has been a curiously recurring theme to this Irish team, which has been as much a puzzle to themselves. Asked why this should be so, O'Sullivan admitted: "I don't know to be honest. I could give you a load of bluster here, and be winding you up, but I don't actually know. Sometimes it's got to do with having the ball."

O'Sullivan admitted that the unforgettable sense of occasion may have overwhelmed the Irish players a little. "There was probably an extra little bit of nervousness there that maybe wouldn't have been there at Lansdowne Road. Hopefully that's over now, and we've got that first game out of the way at Croke Park."

Defensive coach Graham Steadman, scarcely concealing his disappointment, admitted that the Irish performance was not without its blips.

"The two tries were soft, if I was being honest. I thought for the first quarter we lacked any real urgency, we were slow to get out of the blocks, therefore we gave them plenty of time in which to execute their plays, and that's why they were comfortable on the ball. For the first 15 minutes we looked vulnerable out wide because there was too much space, we were just far too compressed. A new combination of D'Arcy and Horgan out wide didn't help matters.

"We addressed that and after the first 20 minutes we looked a little bit tighter. They didn't score for 60 minutes and they didn't look like scoring. But we talked all week about them being a threat when the quicker men came into midfield looking for mismatches and it came back to haunt us. Hugely disappointing and overall we've certainly got to tighten the ship up for the game against England in 12 days' time."

John Hayes has copped most of the blame for the concession of that 79th-minute Vincent Clerc try, but as Steadman emphasised there was much more to the defensive gap which Clerc superbly explored with a change of pace and two changes of direction as Neil Best and Shane Horgan also drifted too hard.

"With what I call reactionary defence, or scramble defence, you've got to deal with what's in front of you first and not worry too much about what's on the outside and cut down the space for the guy in possession, and we didn't do that. When you've got a quality speedster like Clerc he's going to punish you and he certainly took his opportunity very well.

"But if you look at the footage we actually had three players within two metres of him to actually stop that threat, but unfortunately not one player nominated (Clerc) under pressure. So it's a harsh lesson to learn but I'd like to think it won't happen again."