'They're in a determined mood' - Farrell insists Ireland are ready to end England hoodoo

Jacob Stockdale, right, and Bundee Aki are back in the Ireland starting line-up for tomorrow's clash against England. Photo: Sportsfile

Ruaidhri O'Connor Twitter

March 19 2021 02:30 AM

After making six personnel changes and three positional switches from the team that beat Scotland last Sunday, Ireland head coach Andy Farrell urged his new-look team to go and make a statement by beating England for the first time in five matches.

Earlier yesterday, Eddie Jones made just one enforced change to his team that beat France so impressively last week as he brought Elliot Daly in at outside centre for the injured Henry Slade.

Ireland, meanwhile, have a vastly transformed side.

With Garry Ringrose (ankle) and James Ryan (head) already ruled out, Farrell lost Will Connors to a worrying knee injury in training on Wednesday.

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He dropped James Lowe from the squad, meaning a start for Jacob Stockdale, while Bundee Aki, who has been overlooked for the tournament so far, comes in for Ringrose. Robbie Henshaw switches to outside centre and Conor Murray replaces Jamison Gibson-Park at scrum-half.

Dave Kilcoyne comes into the front-row to freshen things up, Tadhg Beirne switches to the second-row to replace Ryan and CJ Stander moves to No 6 as Josh van der Flier and Jack Conan come into the back-row and Peter O’Mahony has to be content with a place on the bench.

Ireland have not beaten England since St Patrick’s Day, 2018, but Farrell believes they’ve learnt from their four successive defeats.

“Through learning the lessons from the games you’ve talked about,” he said of those losses.

“I feel that the last outing (in November) – it was a physical game like it always is, certainly at Twickenham but I felt that we were within ourselves.

“Regarding playing the game that’s in front of us so hopefully we can combine the two this week and give a good account of ourselves.

“We’ve got to have courage to go out there and win the game and the statement that we want to make, to ourselves first and foremost.

“The mental state of the squad is very strong. They’re very buoyant this week, in a determined mood.

“They know that this is the last game of the competition, where we get a chance to put our best performance out there for 80 minutes, which is something that we haven’t quite achieved yet.

“We’ll need to do that to win and they’re in a determined mood to make that happen.”

England coach Jones is expecting an aerial bombardment from Ireland.

“100pc, A lot more aerial contests, a lot more working off kicks,” Jones said. “We have tried to create the Irish game-plan in training as we try to do every week.

“They have historically over the last period of time kicked the ball a lot more and gone to the air a lot more and create an unstructured situation where they then play off. We are anticipating at they will play like that a lot more.”