![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Murray-K-133x133.png\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n Murray Kinsella<\/p>\n
Reports from Affidea Stadium<\/p>\n
IRELAND HEAD COACH Scott Bemand expressed his pleasure at how his team came through some challenging moments to notch a 33-12 win over Wales in the Six Nations.<\/p>\n
The Welsh scrapped for everything in Belfast but Ireland scored five tries to earn a bonus-point victory that sends them into next weekend\u2019s closing-round clash with Scotland at the Aviva Stadium with momentum.<\/p>\n
Having also beaten Italy in Galway in the second round, Ireland are on course to win all of their home matches in the championship.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe wanted to come out of this competition with three home wins,\u201d said Bemand.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo we just scored a bonus-point win at home, which is the second part of that, which leads us nicely into next week. It was really important to come back from France [where Ireland lost] and get the result.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe always go after the performance. There\u2019s bits of that performance that we\u2019re incredibly proud of and there\u2019s bits where we feel we left out there. But credit to Wales, I think they turned up and they made it incredibly combative, got pressure on the breakdown.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think we got an awful lot of fast ball out there and had to deal with some different things that we\u2019ve not really experienced that much of before.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo summarise it, it\u2019s one of those days that we still found a way to score more tries. So we\u2019ve got the bonus point. Job done. We go into next week full of confidence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite the happy outcome, there was an undoubted sense that parts of Ireland\u2019s performance left them frustrated.<\/p>\n
![\"linda-djougang-and-eve-higgins-celebrate-after-aoife-wafer-scores-a-try\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1778362511_510_.JPEG\")
\n Linda Djougang and Eve Higgins. Nick Elliott \/ INPHO<\/p>\n
Nick Elliott \/ INPHO \/ INPHO\n<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a sign of how their expectations and standards have risen in recent seasons, and it leaves Ireland looking for their most complete performance of the campaign against Scotland next time out.<\/p>\n
Bemand believes there is plenty more to come from this team.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there\u2019s loads,\u201d said Bemand. \u201cI think we said early, didn\u2019t we, that if we lost to France, it wasn\u2019t going to make or break our season or our competition.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was actually watching some footage back from two years ago when we played Wales in Cork, and it\u2019s almost unrecognisable the group that we were becoming to what we were. And I was going to show some clips, and I actually chose not to. That\u2019s a different world.<\/p>\n
\u201cProbably we\u2019re all left feeling, \u2018Ah, it wasn\u2019t quite the performance that we\u2019re after.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s OK. You get games where the breakdown is messy, you can\u2019t get fast ball, and you\u2019ve got to find a way. You\u2019ve got to find a way to deal with challenges that are maybe slightly unique or something you\u2019re not used to facing.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe left a couple out there as well. So in terms of performance and where we\u2019re going, we\u2019re teeing ourselves up nicely. We\u2019re just going to keep growing it. We wear our learnings well.<\/p>\n
\u201cNext week comes with its own different set of challenges and we\u2019ll be better at finding solutions. We\u2019re going to keep going after getting the ball down, which we got today.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe got some nice pick-and-go tries which is a reflection of some of the work that we\u2019ve learned against France. And when we get opportunities, we\u2019ll just keep trying to be better at getting them on our terms.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Murray Kinsella Reports from Affidea Stadium IRELAND HEAD COACH Scott Bemand expressed his pleasure at how his team…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":440912,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[123980,61,60,43,2447,15551,192023,4381],"class_list":["post-440911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-erin-king","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news","tag-scott-bemand","tag-six-nations","tag-step-two","tag-wales"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=440911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440911\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/440912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=440911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=440911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=440911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}