AUTUMN SERIES: Gerry Thornleytalks to the Ireland coach about the lessons learned from the autumn Tests and where the team go from here .

TWO WINS, two defeats. Ho hum. Compared to the standards set last November, emerging unbeaten from scraps with Australia, Fiji and South Africa, the Irish squad won’t have been swinging from the chandeliers on Sunday night, though at least they ended the series on a winning note, which is more than can be said for France, England or Wales.

Ireland could also have been said to have made some progress over the month, and have expanded their options, both in playing style and personnel. Thirty players were used, 26 starting, and Ireland scored two tries in each game and conceded seven in all.

Furthermore, unlike many of their European rivals, Ireland could be said to have shown some consistency and progression, although coach Declan Kidney wasn’t taking solace in that.

“I don’t think so, and I suppose we’d always set our own standards. That’s a nice spin – not a spin, but it’s a nice way of looking at it – but I wouldn’t.

“What disappointed me was when you lose two,” he admitted, for he remains first and foremost a results coach, and two wins out of seven Tests rankles, even if seven wins, one draw and six defeats in the calendar year is not disastrous.

What pleased him most, he said, was “the way they stuck at it as a squad. There’s been a number of changes and developing a squad is never quite as easy, so there’s a huge generosity that has to be shown off the pitch.

“On the pitch, they’re getting more comfortable making decisions and understanding that if they make a decision they won’t be castigated for making the wrong one, but they’ll look to learn from each one. That’s a positive and the negative – in my perverse way I see the negative as a positive. Imagine when we start getting our lineout ticking and kick-off receipts ticking and we don’t allow ourselves to get counter-rucked, then that’s how many balls (lost)?”

If he could take back one half among the eight it would be the first one, against South Africa.

“Looking back, the first 40 minutes against South Africa put us under a lot of pressure to try and win that one. Had we got a win in that one we could have relaxed things a little bit more.

“If we get the first 40 minutes right against South Africa we’d be in a happier place now, even though we did have a 20-point defeat against New Zealand.

“But, like I say, with New Zealand, the more often we play them the better. We’re okay, but I wouldn’t get overly excited about it,” he conceded candidly.

Far from lamenting the gruelling series, Kidney wished there were more games, albeit with a break or two in between. And not for the first time, he enviously compared the “intermittent” Northern Hemisphere calendar with its southern counterpart. “It goes on in reverse to the Southern Hemisphere: Super 14 for four months, Tri-Nations, tour for another four months. Happy days. It’s an easier thing to co-ordinate.”

Hence, the evolution of a more expansive playing style has been applied intermittently, first against the Scots, then on an injury-bedevilled summer tour and now the past month, before another two-month hiatus.

“If we go and try and play the way we did two years ago, whereby you set two targets inside your own half and kick it down, you end up defending all day. So I don’t think there’s a choice really,” he said, in rejecting the notion that they could have begun the process earlier. And he maintained that there is still time to complete the process ahead of the World Cup.

“Yes, but it won’t be just keeping the ball for the sake of keeping the ball. I think there were times over the last four weeks where we should have been kicking it but we didn’t. I know there’s talk of quantum change, but there’s very little change really. It’s ‘how do you get out of your own half?’. You can’t get out of your own half anymore by just two targets and kick. It just won’t happen.

“We had to adjust that bit, and then with the change of law emphasis in terms of hanging on to the ball we had to be more patient in their half by hanging on to it a bit more.

“They’re the only changes. Other than that we’re actually playing the same. I think to say that we’re playing a new game, I wouldn’t feed into that. I know there might have been talk about new ideas and stuff like that, but there wasn’t any vast change in plan. We’re adapting to the change of law emphasis rather than just trying to do it, because we still have to work to our skill levels.

“I think part of that is getting the balance of decisions as well. So the players do have the licence to make decisions.

“But I suppose I’ve always felt it’s a players’ game.”