One of Ireland's better performers in the first Test, Donnacha Ryan knows Ireland need a massive improvement, writes GERRY THORNLEYin Auckland

AS IF the scale of the task facing Ireland technically wasn’t daunting enough – playing with more accuracy at a tempo they struggled with last Saturday and against a more honed All Blacks this coming Saturday – there is also the psychological challenge. No wins in 25 attempts dating back over a century, another 32-point beating, moving into the 50th week of their season, and all that.

“Personally, I don’t play to lose,” said Donnacha Ryan, who marshalled the Irish lineout superbly and was one of the team’s hardest working players last Saturday. “I don’t think anybody in the dressingroom does that either.

“We just have to take one game on its merits. Fair enough, it was a bad day at the office on Saturday but we just need to keep trucking with it and not get too despondent. We just need to refocus today and get into a hard training session tomorrow.”

Making his first Test start against a team from the Southern Hemisphere, Ryan readily agreed that last Saturday’s opponents were the best team he had ever faced.

“I played against them in Thomond Park in 2008 and I knew we were going to have to be as aggressive as possible and it was going to be a very intense game. Certainly the first 20, 30 minutes were very, very fast and it was definitely a very fast introduction to that pace.”

Yet one of his team-mates that night, Rua Tipoki, believes that the epic performance of that second-string Munster outfit shows that anything is possible, even if it was in front of a capacity Thomond Park and against the All Blacks mid-weekers.

Tipoki met up with some of his old team-mates for dinner on Monday night and maintains that, if Ireland take a leaf out of Munster’s manual that night and, for starters, throw their bodies on the line and smash anything in black as if it is the last game they’ll ever play, anything is possible.

Asked if Ireland could draw any inspiration from that Munster performance (the entire pack had played AIL rugby that season but the All Blacks only won courtesy of a 77th minute try by Joe Rokocoko) Ryan said: “It’s funny we had a lot of rookies that night. I remember that night. We missed 47 tackles,” he said, but scrambled and worked so resourcefully (and took all their chances) that they were winning late on.

“That’s why, going out the last day, I realised that anything is possible, if you keep believing. We were in the reckoning there with three minutes to go but obviously it didn’t work out.

“But this is a different team and we’re playing against a different team. They’ve evolved since then. We’ve just got to go down there, pick ourselves up and refocus and get on with it.

“That was a unique day I suppose. With Munster you’re playing with lads that you’re training with all the time, as well the guys (Tipoki, Lifeimi Mafi, Doug Howlett and Jeremy Manning) who had their own haka as such.

“I wouldn’t say we weren’t any more up for the game last weekend as well, it was just on that night there a few balls maybe they spilled and we were able to capitalise on them a small bit. So it was a different game on that night, and it made a difference that we were playing at home at the time. You just have to take every game on its merits.”

Ireland employed a rush defence occasionally with some success, but were often forced onto the back foot as well. “Sometimes when you go through multi-phase you’re going to have different guys in the backline,” explained Ryan in giving an insight into what they were facing.

“You’re going to have props mixing with centres so obviously just holding the line together is massive, and having a bit of consideration for lads who aren’t as fast. It’s just basically working together as much as you can and just realising it’s just heads up then, because one minute you might have (Kieran) Read in front of you, the next minute you might have Sonny Bill (Williams).

“So it’s a different injection of pace and it’s just a case of having a bit of empathy. They did make line breaks but I thought we did scramble well, and there was a lot of positives in our defence. It’s just that we turned the ball over when we were on attack which was quite frustrating.”

Asked if New Zealand had shown any obvious weaknesses (and save for not being even more clinical, it’s hard to think of any) Ryan preferred to focus on Ireland’s weaknesses, namely eight unforced turnovers in the opposition half, and five in their 22.

“We have to try to hang on to the ball and put them through phases, try to test them as best we can. We have to get our own stuff in order before we really focus too much on them at this stage, from the weekend. I think we’ll certainly try to persevere with what we’re trying to do.”