DECLAN KIDNEY remained heroically stoic. The Ireland coach again expressed his wonderful capacity to temper the excesses of, well, us. You tell him ‘Rob Kearney soared’. He’ll answer, ‘well what about Cian Healy?’ You say ‘Sexton came of age’, he’ll say, ‘maybe Ronan would have kicked the penalties Jonathan missed’. You say ‘fantastic team performance’, he’ll tell you ‘they didn’t score any tries’. You say ‘what about O’Driscoll?’, he’ll say, ‘did you see Seán O’Brien?’

There is never a flare-up moment with Kidney, never a conversation when he goes wildly off message. His instinct is to spread the love and maybe the occasional pain too. It is to preach restraint. His first career as a teacher was in part about telling young fellas not to get too carried away with themselves.

Occasionally he may still see that as his role when he dips a toe into the post-match media event. But Kearney did do, well? Yeah? No? Man-of-the-match and everything? “Yeah, well, you can’t beat the bit of Gaelic football, you know?” said Kidney, buying time.

“He was solid there, he was solid in the Lions, I’m delighted for him. He just had one of those games today that went for him and he’s been good for us all the time. What can I say, it was there to be seen but you know he’s a top -class fullback.

“It’s like a good goalkeeper in soccer,” added the coach moving his analogies around the sports.

“If you have that bit of confidence then it allows the others to push it forward, put a bit more pressure on them up front and then if they have a kick out he sweeps along and cleans a lot of things up. But I think a fair few bombs came down Tommy’s way as well so I thought he went about his business pretty well.” See?

And Sexton? “I said that I wanted to give him a go to see what he would do and how he did, I thought he went okay,” explained Kidney. “It was that sort of game where the forwards and the number nine had a huge say in how the game went.

“He slotted the few penalties, that’s different to how you play at outhalf, but you know there were one or two that went astray and maybe Ronan would have kicked some more.

“What I’m really hoping is that we don’t go down the road of just giving one a rough time. It’s just a blessing that we have both and we’re going to need both of them going down. If we were without one or the other now, we wouldn’t be in a good place.”

The mantra about team- building and performance remained the same, for public consumption at least. Kidney has not been diverted from his need to build a squad of depth. He hints that he is not yet quite where he wants to be. But he is assuredly travelling in the right direction and at a sensible speed. You ask is there more to come in their development.

“A coach has say yes to that one,” he says. “Yeah I think there are little areas that we can look to improve on. Our defence is going pretty well, Les (Kiss) won’t be happy that there was a try that went in today but that’s the standard that the man sets.

“In attack we didn’t score a try, so obviously there will be areas that we’ll need to do that in. And then there’s a whole series of things we’ll have to learn by dealing with playing away from home, there are a lot of away matches coming up now – London, Paris, we’ll go to New Zealand for a couple of weeks and then finish off in Brisbane on the 24th or 26th of June.

“There are young players there who have to get the opportunities to come through, I think that was the fun of the last three weeks as well. The match last night, where there were a good few lads playing who you mightn’t see week in, week out, and also the Tonga game. So by rotating that then we’ve spiced things up.

“I suppose I do believe that players learn more off themselves, or as much off themselves, as they can learn off any teacher or coach. If you get that competitive environment, they’ll push one another along and make each other better.”