I was pretty stiff and sore as I drove home from Belfast late on Friday night. There were two lessons to take from the game. First, this will undoubtedly be the most physically demanding World Cup yet and second, we’ve a lot to do if we’re going to meet those demands.

There’s no denying what should have been a special night turned into a big disappointment. It was a balmy evening and the crowd were great — I was pleasantly surprised by the number of green shirts at Ravenhill. I won’t, though, be surprised if our supporters are worried 14 days from our first game.

We’d like to be showing a bit of form but we haven’t. While I don’t think we’re worried, it definitely puts us in a more honest position going into the competition of where we are and what we have to do. We can’t forget we’re a team who have to work our socks off first and foremost before we start playing ball.

Eddie said a few harsh words in the dressing room afterwards — nothing we didn’t know ourselves but it was probably no harm they were said. He says the problem is not hard to fix. It’s a mindset we have to fix, not our skill levels, so once we do that, and I don’t think it will be that hard, we’ll be a different team.

We need to start getting the simple things right again. After positive Six Nations performances against England and Italy, we looked to develop our game further, to work on skills such as off-loading, little microplays between backs and forwards. In training we’ve improved massively on them but none of it applies without go-forward, without clean ball for the scrum-half.

It’s easy to forget about the simple things you were doing so well, the things that take hard work and aggression. I suppose we may have left those things behind a bit in Murrayfield and Ravenhill. No matter how good your backline is, you can’t do anything off slow ball, especially against teams such as Italy who have been training together for six or seven weeks in a row and have good, well-organised, hard-lines defences.

DO WE have time to fix these problems? Definitely. I reckon it’s the sort of thing that can be fixed within the space of a week’s hard work.

I’m not as worried as some people seem to be about our scrum. The main issue on Friday was with the way Nigel Owens called us in. Without going into the nitty-gritty, his timing of “Crouch, touch, pause, engage” was unlike anything we’ve come across. We took about four scrums to get used to it.

The Italians are strong scrummagers, no doubt, but I thought our scrum was excellent in the second half. That said, we can’t afford to have another performance like the first half simply because of refereeing interpretation. It’s something we’ll need to clarify before the competition.

We were pulled for two lineouts because we were slow getting it in but otherwise I thought the lineout went well. We’re definitely looking to speed up the lineout in the World Cup but we clearly can’t show our hand in warm-up games.

All told it was a poor performance but part of the reason for that has to be the Italians. After being badly beaten in Rome, they were always going to come out all guns blazing. Their continuity game was good and they were very aggressive at the breakdown, which killed any quick ball for the likes of D’Arce or Andrew. With our backline, that’s one of the most important parts of our game and we just can’t afford to be beaten there.

Did they deserve to win? I’m not so sure. It’s funny. Down through the years, whenever Ireland have been pipped by teams in the last few minutes, the slant put on it was, “Whoever wins it, deserves to win it.” Why not on Friday? I think it showed good experience from our boys to come back and score at the death. I didn’t have a view of the try but Rog was convinced he got it down. The Italians were livid afterwards but maybe they’re missing the big picture.