Ian Madigan

If Italy look really good and they are an improving side... Now, what I will say about them is they've consistently been really poor when we've played them in the Aviva for as long as I can remember.

And I don't want to unnecessarily be talking them up.

But if they play really well against Scotland and then suddenly they're looking at our vulnerabilities going, maybe we'll have a crack here.

The style of play that's needed to beat Italy is very different to the style of play needed to beat France.

So Faro's going to be looking to plug in players to implement that game plan.

So it's not going to be changes for changes' sake.

It's going to be changes to ensure that we get a bonus point win because that's exactly what's needed and ideally close the gap on that points difference.

Yeah.

But how the fixtures are laid out, having England round three is a disaster for us.

If there was one team...

that I would have asked to avoid at round three, it would have been them.

And then we have a week off and then we play, you know, perceived one of the weaker teams in the competition in Wales.

That's ideally when we would have been playing England.

Yeah.

Yeah, totally.

And look, Ireland have just got to focus on the controllables and that's getting momentum back into their training sessions and trying to get that mojo, that confidence back.

You know, it was definitely a little bit of a mindset at the weekend of I don't want to make mistakes as opposed to I want to make something happen.

And that's confidence.

It's a hard thing to measure, but it's an easy thing to see.

And that's the reality of where we're at.