Farrell believes Ireland became 'too desperate' against the All Blacks

Ireland head coach Andy Farrell believes that his team became too desperate against the All Blacks on Friday night at the Aviva Stadium.

Ireland’s 19-game home unbeaten run came to an end after a disappointing display against New Zealand. A series of poor handling errors and a late try from Will Jordan meant that Ireland lost 23-13 on the day.

Ireland’s points came from Josh van der Flier and a series of kicks from Jack Crowley, but overall it was an uncharacteristically poor performance from this Irish side.

An investigation will now be conducted into what went wrong in Ireland’s opening game of the Autumn Nations Series, with Argentina up next in Dublin on Friday.

Farrell believes that the sequence of forced errors led to a compounding effect, and he believes fixing their mentality as key to progressing in the series.

“It’s not right to try and be desperate, chasing your tail, when you’ve made an error, whether it be a penalty or a dropped ball, and then compounding that error with another mistake. All of a sudden, field position is gone, and points come off the back of that,” said Farrell to Sky Sports. 

Andy Farrell, the Ireland head coach, (Photo by David Rogers/Getty Images)

“We did that a number of times. We need to fix our mentality in that respect—getting back to neutral and regaining the ball in the way we want to. We became a little too desperate, and as a result, the energy and accuracy weren’t what was needed.”

Farrell now believes it’s time to move forward and that finding solutions to Friday’s issues needs to happen sooner rather than later.

The Ireland coach also recognises that Argentina will pose a real threat on Friday.

“We move on,” said Farrell. “We have to. We need to find solutions as soon as possible because we’ve got a hungry side in Argentina who are playing some really good rugby at the moment.

“We need to get back on the horse and start it all over again, don’t we?