Ireland waiting on fitness of key trio

Ireland’s hopes of spoiling New Zealand’s perfect season could be decided tomorrow — 24 hours before the sides are due to clash at the Aviva Stadium.

Ireland coach Joe Schmidt should know by then whether three of his key men will be fit to face the world champions.

Jonathan Sexton (hamstring), Rob Kearney (rib) and Brian O’Driscoll (calf) are all struggling to make it in time and forwards coach John Plumtree admitted yesterday it was far from ideal to have such important players unable to take a full part in on-field preparations.

“We’ll make a call on Johnny later in the week, he didn’t train today. He had a run yesterday [Tuesday], about 50-60% and he had a rest day today [Wednesday], so we’ll see how he goes on Thursday.

“Rob trained today, I haven’t spoken to him since training. We didn’t do much contact. Brian hasn’t trained either but we have the luxury of an eight-day turnaround.

“The reality is that Joe would have liked them to have trained the last couple of days, but the reality of it is that they haven’t been able to. We still have two sessions and if they can get back on the field on Friday we’d be pretty happy with that.”

Plumtree was as disappointed as Schmidt following the defeat by Australia and said the leaking of so many easy scores was not acceptable.

“Yeah, definitely, we leaked four soft tries which the Australians didn’t have to work too hard to get. They took us wide once, back to wide and the next minute they were scoring under the posts. That’s unacceptable.

“There was a driving lineout that we knew was coming but we didn’t deal with it and that was disappointing.

“The try they scored from the scrum was a poor scrum from the forwards because we didn’t apply any pressure and we got it wrong defensively, that allowed Quade Cooper in — and those were soft points.

“Any point we got, we had to work for and one thing that annoyed me about playing against the Australians was that they gave away penalties every time we got behind them consistently.

“We only got three [points] when it might have been seven and I think [Australia] they learned that from playing New Zealand and South Africa. It is disappointing that we didn’t look after those situations better.”