Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Moloney: I mourned that loss..
DARK clouds lingered over Cliodhna Moloney at the start of this week as the Ireland scrum-half stewed over Saturday’s heavy defeat to France.
After the high of hammering Wales came the low of coughing up over 50 points to the rampant French at Energia Park.
As disappointing as that was, Moloney insists the situation is “redeemable” against an Italy side that performed well against Scotland and fully professional England in this championship.
“100 per cent,” said the 27-year-old. “It wasn’t a nice two days anyway, the sun was shining over here in London but I didn’t want to see or hear anybody for the last two days.
“You’re kind of in a state of mourning after a game like that. You really are trying to take a step back and be real and review it but you’re also upset with your own performance, the team’s performance, everything like that.
“So it takes a little while to come around and have a measured approach to what actually happened and doing a precise review and preview going forward of what went wrong and why did we lose in the fashion that we did lose, where did the errors come from and stuff like that.
“So, absolutely, it’s redeemable and we can put in a performance at the weekend and beat Italy and that is what we’re aiming to do.
“The whole squad now is over the France game in that they have taken their learnings, we know where we went wrong, we know where we made our errors in the lead up, we know where we made our errors in the game and we’re ready to rectify them, I think.
“We’d probably say that we’d love to play France again this weekend and see how we get on, but we have got Italy and we know that that’s a huge challenge in itself.”