Bowe relieved to finish with a victory

Ireland winger Tommy Bowe was relieved to come away with a win over Argentina; a side that his team have struggled against on many occasions.

“Delighted with the win. Argentina have always been a difficult team to come up against especially for the Irish,” he said.

“To come away with our highest winning margin against them in the last game of the year is a great positive for us going through to the Six Nations.”

Declan Kidney’s men finish the Autumn series with a 50% win ratio having lost to South Africa and New Zealand but succeeding against Samoa and Argentina.

“I think we can keep our heads up,” said Bowe.

“Whenever we’ve had dry ball, we’ve shown that we’re able to throw the ball about. We’ve plenty of players who are willing to play good rugby.

“When we get the chance, we’re able to cut teams open and we’ll be looking to build on it.”

Despite a frustrating second-half performance from his side, Bowe was happy how his back three partnership with Geordan Murphy and Andrew Trimble developed during yesterday’s 29-9 defeat of Argentina in the final international of the Autumn series.

The attacking potential of the three players was most apparent in an early counterattack instigated by Murphy and Bowe that led to a searing break from Trimble.

“Bit of both really,” said Bowe, commenting on whether the move was pre-rehearsed or off-the-cuff.

“It’s something that we haven’t really practiced, but we thought might work.

“You see a lot of the teams down under doing it - it’s just trying to pick holes...whenever the three of us were back, we were able to attack.”

The Ospreys winger is confident that Ireland can kick on from their November performances and further develop their attacking game.

“That’s the type of rugby that we want to play especially in our own half when we’ve got a bit of ball,” he said.

“The team is full of players who are very confident with ball in hand and, for me personally, I’d love to play that type of rugby all the time.

It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a perfect performance against the Pumas, but Ireland’s error count was significantly lower then the previous week’s game against the All Blacks.

“I think we did well,” said Bowe.

“We held onto the ball especially with the Argentineans being very good at low tackles - the ball was relatively slippy with the snow, but I think that we’ve improved different areas of the game that we wanted to improve from last week.

“New Zealand were a totally different challenge to this week, but we’re delighted with the win.”

For the second week in a row, Keith Earls came off the bench and was disallowed a try by the television match official, who ruled that the Munster winger had knocked the ball on. Several replays, however, showed the touchdown to be good.