Caelan Doris pleased with Ireland's flexibility in best performance of November

The Ireland captain said he enjoyed his cameo at centre. 

DOMINANT: Ireland's Caelan Doris evades Fiji's Kitione Salawa. Picture: ©INPHO/Ben Brady

Ireland captain Caelan Doris declared his team’s dominant victory over Fiji as their best performance of the Autumn Nations Series following a 52-17 victory at Aviva Stadium on Saturday.

Ireland had been well below-par in their opening Test of the November international window, losing 23-13 to New Zealand a fortnight ago, a defeat that ended a 19-match winning run on home soil at the Aviva dating back to 2021.

They had rebounded seven days later to defeat Argentina 22-19 but it was a patchy and ill-disciplined performance, failing to score after the 33rd minute and conceding 13 penalties for the second game in a row, with two yellow cards.

Against a confident Fijian side buoyed by a victory over Wales in Cardiff, Ireland made light of a team showing seven changes and two positional switches from the Pumas win, to run in eight tries as debutants Gus McCarthy at hooker, and flanker Cormac Izuchukwu played influential roles and fly-half Sam Prendergast, starting at number 10 following a debut off the bench the previous week looked to the manor born, despite an early yellow card.

“I think it's our best of the three,” Doris said of Ireland’s performance. 

“Felt pretty dominant out there.

“Good start to the game, similar to last week and the message at half-time was to have a ruthless start to the second half and to kick on. Our attack hasn't quite fired in the second half over the last couple of weeks, but it was good today, we got a few tries off the back of it.

“It's pretty pleasing … there was a bit of an onus on some of the older, more experienced guys to take a bit of a load off the younger guys, and I think there's a pretty even spread across the week, even the guys who weren't playing stood up and allowed the young guys to do what they do best.” 

Doris finished the match playing at outside centre as Ireland reorganised in the wake of injuries to full-back Jamie Osborne and left wing Jacob Stockdale. Replacement fly-half Ciaran Frawley came on at full-back, scrum-half Conor Murray went off the bench to the wing and when Ireland ran out of backline cover, Ronan Kelleher’s introduction at hooker saw starting number two McCarthy move to flanker, replacement blindside Cian Prendergast go to No.8, from where Doris switched to the midfield.

“I enjoyed it out there!” the back-rower said. “There was a bit of wherever the ball's going, I'll go to the other side. But it was enjoyable.” 

Doris praised the way the matchday squad took the changes in their strides.

“I think the way the environment is, it's seen as an exciting challenge as opposed to a burden or something to fear. You look back at Scotland in 2023 when so many people were out of position at half-time quite early in the game. I was off, Ronan was off, Church (Cian Healy) was in at hooker, Josh (van der Flier) was throwing in, it's from there and there's an excitement about it and wanting to figure it out together on the pitch as opposed to being, 'Oh shit, what are we going to do now?" So it was pleasing.”