THE SCALP of Italy, it seems, is not enough. A win that can be construed as something less than a resounding victory was casting a shadow of sorts over the Irish team. Maybe something can be extracted from the fact sights are set so high.

But Italy were emphasising that they lost the second half only 6-3, while a ragged, imperfect Ireland were modelling a theory that another week together will iron out some of the problems that hampered their progress, especially in the last 40 minutes.

The weakest team in the competition first up followed by the most difficult place in the history of the competition for Ireland to win – Paris – next week and Declan Kidney’s team will be anxiously looking for another gear.

“Yeah, but like I suppose if we were playing England and then playing France next week you’ll probably be saying it’s hard playing two of the big teams in the world,” says Gordon D’Arcy.

“We won’t know until Saturday whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. My own thought is there is 20 or 30 per cent to improve there. The lads know it and I think everyone watching the game knows it. That’ll be something that will be stinging a little in the back of our minds until we start training on Monday.”

There was little talk of frustration or panic with Stade de France looming. Kidney has worked on keeping his side fresh this year and a by-product of that is the early outings might not be as seamlessly put together as might have been the case had he worked them harder and longer before the championship began. Keeping the players with lots in the tank was an enduring theme after the match. But does it come with a price?

“That can only benefit us,” explains the Irish centre. “With some combinations it’s their first time going out. Some combinations were coming back together. They hadn’t played in a while.

“I think the big thing is everybody played well individually, maybe the units played well but as a team we were a little bit ring-rusty. That gap between the units needs to be soldered a little bit and once we get that we’ll go a long way. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. That’s the great thing about it. We’ll sit down and look at the video objectively, and once we do that we can figure out that doing one thing differently will change the next four or five phases. It’s the small little things but it’s getting them right. When we got to game four and five last year we showed we were definitely fresher coming into them, more than other teams.”

While Italian coach Nick Mallet picked Ireland as the team with the best back line in Europe, it was just that area where the performance, Jamie Heaslip’s try aside, stuttered to get motoring. But D’Arcy doesn’t believe that getting quick ball was the problem, more where they got it.

“Yeah, the first phase was a wee bit scrappy. When we had good scrum ball they were giving away penalties, I’m not sure whether that was a tactic or not to try to contain us, it probably was because whenever our backs got ball we looked very dangerous,” explained D’Arcy.

“We did get quick ball but where we got it was probably more the problem. We got a lot of quick ball from our 22 out, but when we got into their 22 we slowed down and we had to be a bit more patient. We probably let them out of their 22 too easy when we had them under the cosh. So that’s something we’ll look at.

“We had plenty of quick ball from our 22 to their 22, we made very good inroads but when you play any team in the world as soon as you get into their 22 their line speed comes up and we just have to be a little bit more patient and calm. It’s something we’ll work on this week.”

Kidney spoke of three areas that needed to improve – “support play, strike off the set-piece and kick chasing game” – and spoke of “cohesiveness between players” or lack of.

But he was generally upbeat, D’Arcy too, and we’ve moved a long way from the gallant losers tag.

“Frustration? We’re very happy with some aspects of the game, stuff that didn’t go so well we’ll have to look at that,” added the centre.

“We’ll have to look at being a little more disciplined, that’s probably the big thing that came out of it today."