Jared Payne will be fully incorporated back into the Irish squad for next Saturday week's penultimate Six Nations match at home to Italy, thereby providing Joe Schmidt with another string to his bow for the final two games and the two wins he has targeted in the hope of achieving a top three finish.
Assistant/skills coach Richie Murphy confirmed: "Jared Payne did a full session today, not with the team, with the medics and the fitness guys. He came through that fine and looks like he'll be fully fit to start next week."
Conor Murray also sat out training, still nursing the wounds from Mike Brown's stray boot at Twickenham, but speaking at the squad's base in Carton House, Murphy said of the battle-scarred scrumhalf: "Conor has a split on his eye, he's got eight stitches. He's grand. He was lucky obviously, it was just in the corner of the eye, but he's fine and he'll be ready for next week.
Murphy added: “He didn’t train today, we’re just looking after him a little bit. He’s obviously a bit bumped up, he got a bit of treatment during that game, so it’s a case of looking after him.”
A run-on Irish team trained with and against the Irish Under-20s, themselves buoyed by the comeback win over their English counterparts which brought their Six Nations losing run to an end, replicating the open session of last Friday week in Mullingar.
“Some guys are gone back to their provinces, so we had about 17 players in today,” said Murphy. “We trained with the Under-20s, which was a pretty good hit out for the guys, very quick and high-tempo training with a little bit of physicality in there as well. The 20s were really good.”
The squad have also conducted their post-mortems into the defeat at Twickenham last Saturday prior to breaking up after the session.
“These weeks when you don’t have a match to look forward to, you always tend to end up looking back,” said Murphy. “We’ve had a very good look at ourselves and from the players themselves and the coaching team.
“We’ve looked at the areas we need to be better at. We were probably a little bit passive defensively at the weekend, sort of didn’t get ourselves set in good positions to be able to come forward and that was one of the focus points for this week.”
“We did create quite a few chances and didn’t quite manage to take them. It’s a common thread from the first three games, so they’re the areas we’re concentrating on. There’ll never be a lack of effort to try and get them right.”
