Gordon D’Arcy insists that Ireland’s bid for a first Six Nations championship win in five years will not be derailed by Saturday’s 13-10 defeat to England.
Ireland’s Triple Crown and Grand Slam hopes evaporated at Twickenham but they still lead the Six Nations table and Leinster centre D’Arcy says they will not let the frustration of the defeat dull their aim of winning the title.
“We’re a better team than we were eight months ago,” D’Arcy, speaking to the Irish Independent, said of Ireland’s resurgence under new head coach Joe Schmidt.
“And the chances of a loss like this derailing the rest of the championship for us, there’s no chance of that happening.
“With Joe driving that, and Paul (O’Connell), Brian (O’Driscoll), Johnny (Sexton), Jamie (Heaslip) and those guys, they are going to be getting everybody back together.
“We can’t change the result but we look at the positives, fix the mistakes and we move forward.
“We focus for Italy and France, then we refocus for Italy, and then we go from there.
“You want to win silverware, so that’s pretty disappointing.
“The whole tournament can be a bit of a game within a game, there’s the Triple Crown but also the championship.
“We’ve lost one but we’re still in the hunt for the other, so it’s not really that easy to think that way at the moment.
“We’ve got to pick ourselves up after a pretty tough loss, then just refocus on Wednesday and Thursday when we meet up.”
The 35-year-old felt that his side deserved a lot more from the game.
“We gave them three kickable penalties and that was probably the difference,” he added.
“They were pretty dangerous in broken field and capitalised on a good offload, and maybe a slip at the back of the field.
“But the discipline around the kickable penalties, that’s the difference.
“We played pretty positive rugby, we definitely played the more attacking rugby and when you don’t get the results from that it can be pretty frustrating.
“We had a couple of scrums on the right-hand side late on and I thought we were definitely going to get something out of it.”
