Kidney: There’s buckets to work on and six days to do it

IRELAND coach Declan Kidneyrefused to be sucked into thedebate over Stephen Ferris’s last-minute yellow card that handed Wales the winning penalty yesterday.

Leigh Halfpenny slotted over the kick from in front of the posts to give Wales victory as boos echoed around the Aviva Stadium following Ferris’s sin-binning by Wayne Barnes. Yet while Ferris’s tackle on Welsh lock Ian Evans looked to have been harshly viewed by the English official, particularly after Barnes had shown yellow rather than red to Bradley Davies for a dangerous spear tackle on Donnacha Ryan, Kidney preferred to keep his counsel, just as he had done in last year’s championship when Mike Phillips had scored a controversial try from anillegally taken lineout. Had the referee been consistent with his yellow cards, the Ireland coach was asked.

“I’ve learned that you work on what you can control and leave the rest to the officials and to themanagement of that,” Kidney replied. “There’s nothing I can do about that. We’ve been in this situation in this fixture last year and we’ve lost a match. We just need to get ready for the next match in six days (against France). We’re not going to betalking about the past now. I’ll just leave that to people whose job it is to look after that.”

Kidney’s hopes of repeating his feat of 2009, when he helped Ireland deliver the Grand Slam have thus come to nought at the first hurdle and rather than blame the officials he instead highlighted some of his team’s shortcomings.

“We’ve been asked to work with the referees’ manager like we did last year, and we’ll try do it again this year. These are decisions that have to be made. We’ll take a good look at what we can solve ourselves first. We gave Wales easy field position, they ran the ball out from the 22 so we need to look at how they made such inroads there.”

Coming just 17 weeks after the painful World Cup quarter-final defeat inflicted on Ireland by Wales, Kidney said yesterday’s game had been much different in nature.

“There was bit more ebb and flow in this game, except this time they had the lion’s share of possession.

“We can take look at our scanning when a scrum-half passes the ball and it’s probably taken out three or four defenders and that’s one or two too many and it can make you a bit light on the outside. So there is buckets to work on and six days to do it.”

Kidney said he believed Ireland had to put those technical matter right in the days before Ireland’s date with France in Paris on Saturday night, rather than address questions ofattitude in the camp.

“I couldn’t give the lads morecredit for their attitude, they work extremely hard, they’re extremely diligent and I wouldn’t question their professionalism for one minute. We have to be smart enough to do the work that needs to be done but wise enough to understand that it is a six-day turnaround.”