WHEN DECLAN KIDNEY opened his curtains on Saturday morning he'd have known what to expect.

The planning has always been part of Kidney's detail and he'd have had the dismal weather forecast down to the hour and, if possible, the minute. Yet there must surely have been that old, nervous yet excited pre-match pep in his step.

This, after all, was his first match-day since Munster's highly-emotive Heineken Cup final victory over Toulouse 24 weeks previously. It was both the culminating high point of a coaching career stretching over two decades, and a new beginning.

As he admitted in the aftermath, the new Irish coach is not good at individualising the game, least of all when it comes to himself. It's his way of deflecting attention, which he's not comfortable about, but it's also in keeping that the game is about players more than coaches. Even so, without giving too much away, it's clear he missed that Saturday feeling badly.

"I enjoyed it. You're a coach, you get involved in games. It's a big change. I love the games week in and week out, but (spells without matches) is one of the things that had to go with this. But the pleasing thing was being able to walk into the dressingroom and see the 22 of them sitting around looking at themselves and just watching and seeing them do that. That's a good place to be. We'll try and do that every time we play. Sometimes we'll win, we might not, but we want to make sure the opposition have to be good to beat us. That won't be such a bad place to be."

Palpably then, he was also relieved to have a match out of the way and be back on the bike after such a long interlude for him. Not just for that reason then, but one ventures he extracted a good deal more from this match than was apparent to many of us.

"It's a game, and one game is worth three or four training sessions. We'll be able to highlight one or two areas that really need work on. In terms of building a panel, it gives everybody a sense of ownership of what the team is about, so having the 22 on the pitch, all of them for 25 minutes or more will help to build a squad ethic too, which is very important, because it does take 22 guys to win these matches. If they feel they have ownership, that can add an edge to their play, and going into next Saturday, we have to have all the edge.

"Because if you are to believe the rankings, then if we do that to Canada, New Zealand will do that to us. We're seven places above Canada, we're seven places below New Zealand. They were young, but I thought there was a healthy respect in the way we approached today's match. We went about it in the first half, we didn't play the way we wanted to play and not respecting them. We played the way we had to, playing due respect to them and to the conditions. And I think if we can bring that wisdom into our play, we become a better side."

Respect for the opposition has also been another consistent thread to his coaching principles. So to those who compare this to a practice run, he said: "That's a bit disingenuous to Canada and the Test match system. Within Ireland we have to get a balance: we seem to do that in so many aspects of what we do in life. If we had just won, well we were no good. Because we've won by a lot, what good do we get out of it?

"We had a Test match, we did a reasonable job. Isn't it much better to be like this than the other way. But at the same time we're not blowing ourselves up. We know what it was. We won a game, and that will feed into confidence."

He admitted Ireland would have learned more from a tougher game, and that the task for the coaching staff was "not to be fooled in any way, but if you're too negative on fellas, they look at you and say 'We won 50-odd to nil, what's wrong with that?'

"So it's a case of keeping a balance. This is where I'm going to have to lean on the experience of the players in there. A lot of them were over in New Zealand last June; that's till fresh in their minds. This is one of the matches you get into it for, isn't it?

"This is your cup final, your Heineken Cup, your Magners League all rolled into one when you play teams like this. It's a huge challenge, but what the hell? Give it a go."