Dan Sheehan: 'Lack of time together not an excuse - it just didn't click for us'

Ireland captain Dan Sheehan after the Gallagher Cup match at Soldier Field. Pic: Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile

Ireland captain Dan Sheehan didn’t look for deflection or excuses after New Zealand found a lethal switch of gears to leave Andy Farrell’s men staring at an ugly opening to autumn.

After a mostly error-strewn and stop-start contest for the first hour in Chicago, the All Blacks reeled off three tries in the space of 15 minutes to turn the contest on its head in the fourth quarter.

An early red card to Tadhg Beirne looked decidedly harsh but Sheehan didn’t reach of the referee’s intervention as any mitigation as he admitted Ireland hadn’t done nearly enough over the 80 minutes as the All Black prevailed 26-13, a scoreline that could have been even more emphatic.

Sheehan runs into contact. Pic: Dan Sheridan/Inpho

“It’s a bitter pill to swallow. We never got going. We saw patches but we couldn’t paint the full picture,” said hooker Sheehan who endured a nightmare time of it in the lineout as set piece issues and discipline came back to haunt Farrell’s side. Perhaps so too did the 20 minutes they had spent playing with 14 men after Beirne’s third-minute upgraded red, which took an age to be first shown as a yellow.

“We were operating at 80% going into halftime. We needed a bit of extra and at times we did. But there was a lot of inaccuracies. Hopefully we can turn it around,” added Sheehan, whose side still led with the clock going past the hour mark but produced not a single clean line break and bar the build-up to Tadhg Furlong’s early try never sparked in attack.

“We said going in that we weren’t going to use [the lack of time together] as an excuse. it just didn’t click for us,” said Sheehan. “We’ve got three big games back at the Aviva.”