Conor Murray focuses on the positives ahead of Scottish test

Conor Murray believes positives can be taken from this season’s RBS 6 Nations campaign, particularly if Ireland sign off with a victory over Scotland on Saturday.

After a draw to Wales and defeats to France and England, Joe Schmidt’s side managed their first win of the championship in their penultimate game last weekend, a 56-15 hammering of a poor Italy side.

Beating a resurgent Scotland in Dublin in the final round would be a much more meaningful achievement.

“It’s been a disappointing Six Nations overall,” scrum-half Murray admitted.

“We always want to be in with a shout, looking at the way the last two years have gone we’ve been successful and not to be in with a shout of winning is disappointing.

We’ll learn a lot more from the other games than we did against the Italians.

“It’s been an enjoyable campaign, we learnt a lot about ourselves. Young players came in and got their first cap and fitted in seamlessly. There’s a lot of positives to take out of it and a lot of learnings too.”

Head coach Schmidt will have Cian Healy and Eoin Reddan available once more after the Leinster pair both returned to training following injuries that kept them out of the victory over Italy.

Captain Rory Best trained yesterday, though, the hooker sitting out the session at Carton House after feeling tightness in a calf muscle.

But assistant coach Richie Murphy said he expected him to resume training tomorrow following a further day’s rest.

Following their nine-try performance against the Italians, it would have been reasonable to have expected little change to the Ireland starting line-up set to be named tomorrow but Murphy begged to differ.

“There is quite a lot of discussion going on between the coaches, some tight calls and I don’t necessarily think that just because we won and scored nine tries to just go ‘right, we’ll move that into the following week’.

“It could be the case that it’s the same team, but we want to try and see how those players are, how they performed (in training); Tuesday was a really good session and the intensity was right up there. We’re going to select the team quite late this week, it’ll be Thursday before we select it.”

Scotland were yesterday forced to rule out injured forwards David Denton (groin) and Jonny Gray (pectoral tear) for the trip to Dublin.