‘A bitter pill to swallow’published at 22:24 GMT
22:24 GMT
FT: Ireland 13-26 New Zealand
Ireland captain Dan Sheehan, speaking to TNT Sports: “It’s a bitter pill to swallow. To be honest, I don’t think we really got going. We saw very small patches of what we were looking for but we couldn’t put the whole picture together.”
“I thought we were operating about 80% coming into that half-time period. We looked to get a bit extra going into that second half. At times we did but there was a lot of inaccuracies at the breakdown and with discipline, so there’s a lot to work on. Hopefully we can bounce back next week and turn it around.”
On if Ireland felt undercooked: “No, we said going in that we weren’t going to use that as an excuse and our training the last two weeks has been physical and been good. We thought we were in a good spot but things didn’t click for us today and we’ll have to have an honest review of that.”