Kidney pleased as Irish A’s on a learning curve

DECLAN KIDNEY believes Sunday’s Churchill Cup final against England Saxons will provide a valuable learning experience for his young Ireland A side.

Kidney added another win to his impressive record since taking the top job in Irish rugby with the weekend semi-final success over Georgia, and his decision to take control of the A-squad for the 2009 Churchill Cup campaign has seen him guide Ireland to a first-ever final appearance in this competition.

Sunday’s final carries Test match status, but Kidney says his side will need to reduce their error count against an England side that put 56 points on Eddie O’Sullivan’s USA Eagles on Sunday.

“The final will be new ground for us,” said Kidney. “It’ll be a great experience for the boys and a big step up obviously against England Saxons. They’ll be a team full of professionals and it’ll be good learning experience for some of our younger guys.”

He added: “When you’re up against a fully professional team every mistake you make is going to be capitalised on. If we don’t cut down our unnecessary errors, we’ll have a rough day against the Saxons. We’ve a week now to work on it and we’ll see how much work we’ll get through.”

Ireland posted six tries in a 40-5 win over an under-strength Georgian side, short 18 full internationals and forced to play a largely amateur outfit. Despite an impressive first-half performance, Ireland dropped their intensity levels in the final 30 minutes of a game that had to be abandoned two minutes from time because of the stormy conditions.

“We wouldn’t be happy with the full 80-minute performance. We came on this tour to see what we could learn about the boys and some of the things we learned we’d prefer not to be knowing – there are areas of our game we know we can improve. We managed to win the game and put ourselves in a good place going forward to next Sunday.

“I think in the first 20 minutes we managed to get ahead on points – I think our first try was a bit fortuitous and came against the run of play. We got one or two good scores and in the second half we took our foot off the pedal, the Georgians came back at us stronger.”

Kidney was reluctant to single out any individuals for praise but was delighted to see Munster’s Tony Buckley get through his third full game between the senior tour and Churchill Cup campaign.

“It wouldn’t be our favourite habit really to pick players for special praise, but you can’t buy experience. You just have to play your way through it, so a lot of our boys are getting experience: Tony Buckley has managed to play three games on the trot, Neil Best went well as did Fergus McFadden – that’s just picking out three. I think all of them are picking up experience and that’s why we came on this trip.”