Dillane, Reddan and Ross likely to play for provinces

Although Ultan Dillane and Eoin Reddan were retained with the Irish starting team from last Saturday's defeat at Twickenham for yesterday's training session at Carton House, like the other six replacements against England they are likely to play for their provinces this weekend in the Guinness Pro12.

Mike Ross might also get some more game time under his belt in Leinster's meeting with the Ospreys on Saturday afternoon to keep his match fitness ticking over. After training with the Irish Under-20s yesterday, the remainder of the starting team are expected to be granted a few days' rest before a squad of about 34 players assemble on Sunday evening for the final two games of the Six Nations at home to Italy and Scotland.

Conor Murray, not surprisingly, sat out training yesterday after undergoing six stitches in that nasty gash just above his left eye following Mike Brown's stray boot at Twickenham, as did Donnacha Ryan. But their well-being for the Italian job is not a concern.

Furthermore, skills coach Richie Murphy declared that Jared Payne should be "fully fit to start" against Italy after coming through a full session with the Irish medical and fitness staff yesterday. Accuracy As well as re-affirming Joe Schmidt's contention from Monday that Ireland's "passivity in defence" had been a focus of the review, so, yet again, had been the failure to convert pressure, attacking set pieces and line breaks into points.

Asked if the players were now showing signs of anxiety or a lack of confidence when creating chances, Murphy said: “Not that we can see. We just haven’t been accurate enough in those situations. I can think of two balls against Wales where we coughed up just a couple of metres off the line where we definitely could have scored, and one against France, maybe even two. Then at the weekend in a couple of early set plays we just turned over the ball. I don’t think it is a case of players losing confidence. It is just an accuracy thing where our ball focus hasn’t been as good as it needs to be.”

Thus far, Ireland have scored only 35 points in three games, despite their goal-kicker having a 100 per cent return, with the aforementioned Murray having scored both tries from close range after close-in drives from the forwards off lineout drives.

As much as anything, Murphy agreed, this team could do with a few tries against Italy. “More than anything else, the difference between not scoring them and scoring them is massive. If you look at it that way I don’t think players’ confidence is going down, but it would go up massively if they were converting those line breaks.” Options One or two more support players might have turned some of the dozen line breaks made against Wales and England into tries. “Once a line break happens it is very hard to get players through if you look at what happens off the ball,” said Murphy, “but it is an area we are focusing on. We have to get our support players through to the ball a lot quicker in order to give him options.

“There have also been times we have got them there and wrong options have been taken. It is a little bit of both, the ball-carrier making that decision and giving him enough time to actually make that last- second decision he might have just gone a little bit early and the opportunity is gone. It is a tough one, but we would rather be making the line breaks than not making them at all. So we do think that these things tend to work out after a while.”

At least the points have come regularly off the "tee" from Johnny Sexton, who has landed nine kicks from nine. "Johnny's in a really good place. He's very settled in his routine and he's delivered really well over the last three games. Nine kicks isn't a hell of a lot but if you look at where they were from, quite a few of them were difficult kicks, sort of 40 metres plus and he's hit them very well."

“The first one at the weekend was particularly good. There was quite a strong breeze coming into him off the right, which he maybe doesn’t like as a right- footed kicker. His line-kicking is really good, his restarts last weekend were, I thought, a lot better than a couple of weeks previously. He is in a good place and it is great to see people focusing on him as a player rather than all the other stuff.”

Amen to that.