Removing the comfort blanket

THOSE who believed they could read Declan Kidney like a book will have to think again after this.

It’s not that the Irish coach has done anything that radical — after all, the four players he has brought in for the visit to Murrayfield already have 192 caps between them — but the consensus would have been that he wasn’t the kind of coach to change a winning team. It’s just not his form, they said, but that would have been to overlook the bold action he took in the build-up to last season’s Heineken Cup quarter-final between Munster and Gloucester at Kingsholm.

On the face of it, there seemed no earthly reason to drop full-back Shaun Payne and scrum-half Peter Stringer but Kidney thought otherwise. He drafted in Denis Hurley and Tomás O’Leary and to say the very least, neither let him or the side down in any way.