Favourites tag not an issue for Ireland, says Andy Farrell

Andy Farrell doesn't believe that his Ireland team struggle with the favourites tag despite another lacklustre performance to end their Autumn Nations Series.

Gus McCarthy’s late try earned Ireland a 22-19 win over Australia on Saturday but they had to overturn a 13-5 first-half deficit, making "enough errors to lose two matches", according to Farrell afterwards.

Ireland went into the last two games against New Zealand, at the World Cup last year and at the start of November, as favourites, but underperformed on both occasions.

Similarly, the team were 12-point favourites when facing England in the Six Nations, which ended in a 23-22 loss, scuppering their Grand Slam chances, and fancied by 14 ahead of last weekend’s game.

The hosts had more possession (58%) and territory (69%), but made 28 handling errors, were turned over 20 times, missed 18 tackles and threw two intercepts.

"No, no," was Farrell’s reply to a question about his charges struggling to deal with expectation.

"I honestly put pressure on ourselves in a certain way to see how we deal with it.

"The more we put ourselves under that type of pressure, the better we’re going to be.

"That’s not to say we’re not going to slip up with that type of pressure.

"In the first half we put it on ourselves this week because of the 150th [anniversary of the IRFU].

"I hype it up more than it should be, probably because I want to see how we deal with it and it doesn’t always work out well but there’s certainly a lot of learning in it."

Scrum-half Jamison Gibson-Park (above) was also asked about Ireland going into themselves in certain games.

"It's been a bit frustrating in patches," said the 32-year-old New Zealand native, who won his 38th cap.

"We've seen mistakes we haven't normally