Wood may have to wait before making return

Although hamstring strains are notoriously slow healers, the Irish management and medical team remained optimistic yesterday that hooker Ross Nesdale's latest tweak will heal in time for next Saturday's World Cup qualifier against Romania.

If so this would forestall the return of Keith Wood until the South African game on Saturday week at the earliest, although it will be a surprise if any residual ill-feeling over Wood's contractual dispute prevents the former Irish captain from returning for that match. In any event, a decision will not be made until this afternoon when the 26-man squad reassembles. After a training session at Greystones tomorrow the Irish management will pick the side to face Romania, but it will not be announced until Wednesday.

Warren Gatland didn't rule out the possibility of changes: indeed he hinted there would be. "We just probably need to sit down and have a chat. We were happy with the players who came on and there are a couple of other guys who weren't involved who might come into contention as well."

Though it hardly constituted the most meaningful or useful outing of all time, Saturday's match against Georgia did serve some purpose, not least in throwing forward three try-scoring debutants - Pat Duignan, Girvan Dempsey and Ciaran Scally.

Even though the 19-year-old Scally was overlooked by Leinster (David O'Mahony and David Hegarty being preferred) before making his belated full debut against Llanelli 10 days ago, Gatland's judgement was fully vindicated by the youngster's eyecatching display.

"When you see a guy like Scally come on, you have to be impressed," said the Irish coach, becoming quite excited by his standards. "I thought his service was excellent for a 19-year-old, and Dempsey looked sharp. Hopefully they'll get a little confidence from this game and the players who are in those positions will think `hang on a minute, I'm under a bit of pressure here,' which is exactly what we want to happen.

"There are some really talented players out there. We know they're out there but we haven't seen some of them being tested and it's quite hard to throw them into a Test arena, and say we're going to take a risk. But there's a couple we are prepared to do that with and hopefully in the future it'll be easier."

The Romanian game offers the last chance for experimentation before the acid test comes on Saturday week, and Wales's epic failure against the Springboks brought Ireland's grudge match against the World champions more sharply into focus. The Irish camp were probably relieved that South Africa didn't lose, while at the same time being grateful that Scotland are next up on the Springboks' agenda rather than Ireland.

Gatland had felt that South African self-confidence was a tad misplaced given that "in the northern hemisphere the grounds are slightly worse, conditions are a bit colder and the ball not flying as far, and the home crowd and the home teams being completely pumped up."

Cocky Springboks? Surely not? "Some of the stuff you read in the newspapers about them saying that they're going to win every game and their only concern is England, with ex-players saying they're just going to waltz through the tour and England might give them some competition. Dangerous things to be saying. I think they got a little bit of a shock anyway."