Ireland hooker Ronan Kelleher is relishing a crunch Guinness Six Nations showdown with “world-class” Scotland.<\/p>\n
The Scots’ statement 50-40 round-four win over reigning champions France has transformed next weekend’s Dublin clash from a Triple Crown shootout to a potential title decider.<\/p>\n
Whichever team is victorious at the Aviva Stadium will move top of the championship table for at least a few hours, before Les Bleus attempt to return to the summit at home to England in the final match of ‘Super Saturday’.<\/p>\n
Kelleher, who made his first start of the tournament in Friday evening’s 27-17 victory against Wales, said: “Look, it is massive for us. We’re obviously really looking forward to next week now.<\/p>\n
“We’ve put ourselves in a good position to win that Triple Crown. There’s still a chance of us winning a championship as well, which is always obviously the number one thing.<\/p>\n
“But it (the Triple Crown) is still massive for us as a group.”<\/p>\n
Kelleher toured alongside 12 Scotland players during last summer’s British and Irish Lions series in Australia.<\/p>\n
“They’re brilliant players,” said the 28-year-old. “It’s obviously well-documented that they have world-class talent throughout their team.<\/p>\n
“We’re just going to have to get back to work, preview the game and get ready to go.”<\/p>\n
Ireland have won 11 matches in a row against Scotland but will no doubt need an improved performance to extend that run.<\/p>\n
Following the jubilation of a record 42-21 success away to England in round three, Andy Farrell’s side scraped past a spirited Wales team which has now lost 15 consecutive Six Nations matches.<\/p>\n
“We probably didn’t hit the same level, but I suppose every Test match is different,” said Kelleher.<\/p>\n
“There were different challenges in the England match and we were unbelievably clinical and ruthless in that first half and kind of dug a bit of a score and managed to convert that pressure to points.<\/p>\n
“We did a lot of good things (against Wales) and we got into the right areas, we just didn’t come away with the tries at that crucial time.<\/p>\n
“It was a very dogged, very tough Test match and they obviously were never going to sit down and just take a beating.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ireland hooker Ronan Kelleher is relishing a crunch Guinness Six Nations showdown with “world-class” Scotland. The Scots’ statement…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":526575,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":["post-526574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-rugby","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=526574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526574\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/526575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=526574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=526574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=526574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}