Ireland face England next Saturday in their opening Six Nations clash
Paul O’Connell believes the Ireland Six Nations squad is back to normal, despite being ‘Home Alone’ without daddy bear Andy Farrell!
According to the former captain, Ireland has flown out, trained, held large and small meetings, and utilized the same chef as in previous warm-weather pre-Six Nations preparations.
“Everyone’s been training, and no one is sitting out, which is good,” said O’Connell, though Dan Sheehan, James Lowe, Caolin Blade, and Jack Boyle will play URC with their provinces over the weekend and then fly over.
“We know we have about 12 days before we play, and it’s always difficult to prepare for a huge international rugby match with only that much time.
“We have a formula that we stick to; we tweak it a little to make it interesting, but otherwise it’s been business as usual. We have a method of accomplishing things before the first game.”
Lineout technician O’Connell has been particularly busy training with the ‘Leinster-lineout-plus-Tadhg-Beirne’ squad, considering their poor performances against Ireland in November and against Leinster in URC/EPRC competition.
There have been important workouts that suggest Rob Kelleher will start against England, not least because Dan Sheehan, who captains Leinster against Stormers tonight at the Aviva, is unlikely to play more than 50/60 minutes in his first game of the season due to injury.
Ireland hopes to become the first team to win a hat-trick of Six Nations titles.
“We’ve been living in this game since the end of the autumn internationals; the players have had a busy stretch of European games and major inter-provincial matches.
“Sometimes you want to come in as a coach and start working really hard straight away so we’ve to be a little bit aware of where they’re coming from, the language they have in their heads from their provinces, and we have to drip-feed in what we’re doing here.”
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