A big setback but all is far from lost for Ireland

SO CLOSE: Wales’ Louis Rees-Zammit dives over the line to score his sides’ second try despite the last ditch tackle of Ireland’s Tadhg Furlong in yesterday’s Six Nations clash in Cardiff.

This one will hurt, there is no doubt about that. Yet despite the twin calamities of Peter O’Mahony’s red card and Billy Burns’s late missed touchfinder, there are plenty of reasons for Andy Farrell to look forward to the visit of France to Dublin this Sunday with as much optimism as the frustration with which he will have left Cardiff last night.

Indiscipline and poor execution will forever be associated with yesterday’s opening-round defeat in the 2021 Guinness Six Nations. O’Mahony’s reckless and dangerous cleanout just 14 minutes in leaving referee Wayne Barnes with no option but to send the Ireland flanker off and leave his outnumbered team-mates 66 minutes-plus to fend for themselves. That those remaining players more than carried the fight to Wales for that amount of time in such an attritional contest at Principality Stadium is a credit to them, even more so that, four minutes into added time, they were in with a shout of stealing victory.