Follow all the action as the All Blacks take on Ireland at Auckland’s Eden Park.<\/p>\n
Kick-off is 7pm Saturday.<\/p>\n
Coach Dave Rennie was satisfied with Saturday’s victory over Italy, but he knows the All Blacks will need to be more ruthless if they’re to beat an in-form Ireland and protect their Eden Park record.<\/p>\n
“It’s a pass mark, but we’ll need to do better,” Rennie said.<\/p>\n
“I thought we were pretty passive defensively in the first 10 or 15 minutes, but really good beyond that. We started to get time and tackle and a lot more line speed, and so that was positive.”<\/p>\n
Leading by just four points at halftime, the All Blacks scored three tries in the first 15 minutes of the second half while Italy had a player red carded for a headbutt, effectively killing off the visitors chances of a comeback.<\/p>\n
Two of those tries were to wing Will Jordan, who bagged a hattrick on Saturday night to become the All Blacks all-time leading try scorer with 50 test tries.<\/p>\n
However, the hosts struggled for continuity in the last third of the game, failing to score any more points until after the fulltime siren.<\/p>\n
Rennie was pleased with the way his side started the second half, but frustrated by the way they ended it.<\/p>\n
“I thought we were excellent after half-time, and probably disappointing in that last sort of 25 minutes where we were just loose. We just needed to be a little bit more accurate.”<\/p>\n
Rennie knows the All Blacks, who now have wins over France and Italy to kick off their season, will need a more clinical and ruthless performance if they’re to beat Ireland.<\/p>\n
Ireland, like New Zealand, are coming off two wins to start their Nations Championship campaign, pipping the Wallabies 33-31 before beating Japan 36-20 last weekend.<\/p>\n
All Blacks to play Ireland:<\/p>\n
5. Patrick Tuipulotu (56)<\/p>\n
8. Ardie Savea (108) (Captain)<\/p>\n
15.\u202fDamian McKenzie (76)<\/p>\n
22. Anton Lienert-Brown (89)<\/p>\n
Unavailable due to injury: Fehi Fineanganofo (shoulder); Leroy Carter (shoulder)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Follow all the action as the All Blacks take on Ireland at Auckland’s Eden Park. Kick-off is 7pm…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":531980,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,213],"class_list":["post-531979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=531979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531979\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/531980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=531979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=531979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=531979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}