“IT’S LIKE everything else in life,” said Declan Kidney. “You have to work through it and see what you can learn from it.”

While most people were seeing red cards and spear tackles and putting English referee Wayne Barnes’ rules interpretation under the microscope, the Ireland coach took refuge in his hoary, home-spun wisdoms.

Never one to be overly demonstrative, Kidney maintained the reserve we have come to expect from him. With the threatening French in Paris next on the horizon, he could have been forgiven for taking a duller view of Ireland’s performance yesterday. A man up with 15 minutes remaining and losing it in the last five minutes is not a thought to take to Stade de France.

Among the partisans at Lansdowne Road, Wales snatching the winner stung but the feeling was Warren Gatland’s team might have played the better rugby. That, at least, took some of the edge off the defeat. The reality though was any thoughts of a Grand Slam ended on the first day.

“That’s the nature of it. Three teams are going to have their Grand Slam finished and three teams are going to work on for it,” added Kidney. “There is a championship still to be won and that’s what we’ll work towards.”

The spear tackle that earned Stephen Ferris a yellow card at the fag end of the match and gave Wales a penalty was in cold storage. Neither Kidney nor his captain Paul O’Connell wanted to be dragged in to Barnes’ call, which turned the match for Wales

“We have to work with the referees’ manager. We did that last year and we’ll try do it again this year,” said Kidney avoiding the thorny issue of right and wrong. “What we can solve ourselves we’ll try and solve . . . field position . . . they ran the ball out of the 22 . How they made such in-roads there . . . we’ll take a good look at what we can solve ourselves. We’ll work on what we can work on.”

His captain was no more forthcoming. O’Connell was close to Ferris when the flanker made the pivotal tackle, judged to have been illegal and dangerous.

“He [Ferris] hasn’t said a lot about it yet,” said O’Connell. “I’d have to watch the video before I could make a decision. I was right beside it and I wouldn’t know if it was right or wrong. I didn’t know there was a problem straight away. But I haven’t seen it on video.”

The secondrow refused to hang Ireland’s defeat on the one incident and pointed to other aspects of the game that if tidied up would have put Ireland in an entirely different position, not holding on by a thread with Wales running at them.

“I don’t think it [Ferris tackle] was the winning and losing of the game,” explained the captain. “I missed a tackle myself for their try late in the game and we probably gave them a lot of ball early on we shouldn’t have. If you’re going to leave it come down to one decision, pick out one player then you are not operating well as a team.

“There was disappointment. I think we put ourselves in a position to win the game and we conceded eight points in that five minutes and that’s what cost us the game, not that one incident.

“I think we conceded a lot of momentum in the first half and gave them a lot of belief. We probably didn’t defend with our heads up like we should. Our scramble defence was really good but we got caught on the short side once or twice. We gave them a lot of momentum and struggled to get into the game in that first half. It took us a while before we got a foothold on territory and play a bit of ball ourselves.

“When we did we scored a good try. You can’t do that. You can’t give a team that length of time with ball in hand. It puts you under a lot of pressure.”

With the six-day turnaround Kidney saw little purchase in excoriating his players or picking on the lapses which had Ireland chasing the ball for more than half of the match, particularly in the first half. If there was a positive way of saying the team didn’t play well, then the Irish coach found it. “Look, we’re a lot better than that, okay,” explained Kidney. “We put ourselves under a lot of pressure defensively. We had to defend for 60 per cent of the game and if you do that you’re asking for trouble.”

The players will lick their wounds for a day and physically recover. Getting recharged is a priority and then, as Kidney explained: “We need to be smart enough to do the work we need to do.”