The wonder is what Paul O’Connell would do differently as captain and player if presented with the end game at Twickenham all over again.

From the media perch on halfway England deserved their 13-10 victory. Craig Joubert's hardly flawless refereeing aside, the physicality of the home defence seemed impenetrable, even with Brian O'Driscoll emptying every trick in his magician's hat.

“There is one lineout I probably would’ve mauled towards the end of the game,” says O’Connell. “But no, I think there were a few clever plays called by Johnny [Sexton], certainly one of them; the plan was to score a try or draw a penalty. I felt we had done what was required to draw a penalty but unfortunately it didn’t come.”

Ireland’s inability to score at the end of tight matches is put to him.

“No, we haven’t discussed not scoring at the end of games. We look at individual plays and ask why we didn’t execute it. It doesn’t really matter at what stage of the game it happened.

“There was one where we executed it absolutely perfectly and got England to do what we thought they’d do. Unfortunately we didn’t get the penalty for it. That was frustrating.”

In the same breath O’Connell accepted the fault lines within the team only became apparent in such an intense environment.

Accuracy
"At the start of the tournament Joe showed us various clips of one score games. With a little bit more discipline you either avoid a penalty or get a penalty. With a little bit more accuracy you score the try.

“That was the thing in the England game, a few little bits of details that we didn’t drop off against New Zealand, Scotland, Wales. Unfortunately under a little bit of pressure in Twickenham it dropped off.”

Sometimes we don’t deserve O’Connell.

Having questioned the Ireland captain at length about O'Driscoll's imminent departure and the scrum yesterday, what do we do when he sits among us print scribes but pepper him with the same guff again.

However, it got better.

“This season we’ve progressed probably since that first game against Samoa. Probably went back a little bit [in Twickenham] but it is very easy to see what we do wrong now and very easy to correct.

“That’s something I noticed from the England game. If all the players watched the game individually and had to write down all the things we did wrong we’d all have a similar opinion on it.

“That clarity is something is something that’s very good and very important.”

We return to one of the pillars of journalism: not the story of why, but why is that?

Intuitive understanding
"We've a certain number of plays. We all know where we are supposed to go, when we are supposed to go there, we all know the lines we are supposed to run and when something breaks down, even out wide it is easy for me or a frontrow to identify it because we have that knowledge of what each other are doing."

The misconception is that Joe Schmidt is flooding our best rugby playing minds with complicated new methods of playing this tough, exacting game.

“I think the best structures I’ve played in are not that elaborate. It’s a tough game, it’s a tiring game and the less you have to think under pressure the better it is.

“Actions being automatic come game day and the more automatic they are the more you can do them as part of your subconscious, the more aggressively and with more intensity you can do them.”

Then an interesting statistic not lost on Munster people. Only two of their own team, O'Connell and Conor Murray, made this squad. Leinster have 15 (three of whom are from Munster).

“I think Leinster have been the dominant force in Irish rugby for quite some time now. You even look at the result in Leinster-Munster games over the last number of years. They’ve won trophies year on year, dominated Europe. I don’t think we can argue with it.”

And O’Driscoll’s last dance? “Yeah, him going will make me the oldest. That’s disappointing.”