Murray finds defeat hard to take

FOR SOME of this team, such as Cian Healy, Seán O’Brien, Keith Earls and others, there should, all being well, be more World Cups. It’s also hard to think of a bigger plus than the emergence of Conor Murray, who ticks all the boxes as a future first-choice Irish scrum-half after impressing throughout this tournament.

Yet even those considerations were of scant concern to the mature 22-year-old scrumhalf. “A few people have said it to me already that I’m going to learn from this but it’s so hard to take. I’m pretty disappointed right now but we’ll learn from those mistakes.

“We have to accept defeat and be disappointed with our own performance – the way we played and our approach to the game. We got beaten up by them in certain aspects of the game and that’s always hard to take.”

The highs of the Australian win in Eden Park and the dissection of Italy in the pool finale only made this defeat worse. “We were playing really well going into this game and it’s hard to think of moments where we brought the kind of intensity we had in other games into the game tonight,” reflected Murray.

“It’s pretty disappointing but we were playing pretty good rugby up to now and one game doesn’t change a team. It doesn’t make a bad team out of ye so we will take positives. But it’s pretty hard to take for now.”

It is unlikely Murray will play with Brian O’Driscoll and Paul O’Connell again in another World Cup, although this was not a point he was ready to accept, though one way or another they clearly left an indelible impression with him. “They’re invaluable to the team. The things they say in dressing-rooms, just the presence they bring in training. They up your own game. I’ve found that anyway. You see them around and see how hard they work and you just want to be as professional as them and try and replicate what they do and play like they do – in your own position.

“I think the team is in a very good position,” he added, looking ahead to the future. “We’ve had a good tournament. Obviously we would have loved to have gone further.”

What disappointed him was how Ireland used their possession. “From what I remember of the game, I don’t think we got a lot of front-foot football. They defended us pretty well. We struggled in that we were playing static rugby as opposed to go-forward rugby. We were trying to get our own game plan going but obviously you need front-foot football to do that but we just found it a bit difficult to get that today.”

Echoing Murray, Tommy Bowe conceded: “After topping our group, today was a huge opportunity and Wales caught us on the hop a little bit in the first 10 minutes with the intensity that they brought, that we really wanted to bring to the game. We got a bit of white line fever a couple of times and not getting the score frustrated us that little bit more.”

“We felt like we played some really good stuff in the first half,” said Stephen Ferris. “We got into the changing room and regrouped and said get the next score and we did that. Got back to 10-10 and were in the ascendancy but then it was just a soft try and they got their tails up, played smart and unfortunately we were on the wrong end.”