Keith Earls: 'We let Scotland beat us'

Wingers always run the risk of exposure.

That was a literal rather than a figurative possibility in the amateur days, one encapsulated by Simon Geoghegan’s experiences in an Irish jersey in the early-to-mid 1990s when he spent a succession of freezing Five Nations weekends waiting forlornly for the ball.

Ireland’s style still isn’t what you might term swashbuckling, but Geoghegan’s successors know far less of that deprivation of possession. Most wings have licence to roam and to get their heads in a ruck. Passes are no longer rationed so severely.