O’Gara focused on the whole nine yards

RONAN O’GARA is making no excuses for his poor touch-kicking performance in Rome.

He doesn’t blame the ball, admitting he tried for too much length and that his failures could have been costly. Yet he has an interesting theory as to why his mistakes - the stats showed 12 - weren’t as serious as many claim.

“There are two ways of looking at it,” he says. “You can miss touch 50 yards from your line or give a line-out 30 yards from your line and I didn’t think that was what we wanted. It’s an area to work on this week and so long as you don’t make the same mistakes two weekends in-a-row, then you’ve succeeded. The Mitre ball is lovely to kick off the ground but in terms of trying to spiral it, it’s difficult.