Greg McWilliams: First-half positives can be built on

Greg McWilliams admitted that he always expected Ireland to lose heavily against England but wants his side to focus on the positives.

The 69-0 scoreline might not suggest too many pluses but keeping the home side, fully professional and ranked number one in the world, scoreless for the second quarter thanks to a series of last-ditch tackles and turnover penalties was something that the head coach was keen to emphasise.

"I said to the players afterwards that I think it's important to separate the emotion and the process," said McWilliams, who was without the services of the sevens players and injured duo Sam Monaghan and Aoife Wafer.

"You don't want them to get murky in the middle. I've been coaching for the guts of 26 years and tactically, from a group of players who stuck to task, that first half was pretty much how we wanted to go.

"I was impressed they did that and to go in 10-0 down was really impressive. We stopped England playing, which is what we had to do to stay competitive. I thought we did it really well, our defensive shape was really good.

"We've given a lot of exposure to the players as to what we felt their attack was going to bring at us and I thought they coped really well with that."

Ireland had to play with 14 women for more than 20 minutes of the second half with first Dorothy Wall getting sin-binned for a high tackle and then Sene Naoupu seeing red for a similarly dangerous tackle that contained more force, according to referee Amber McLachlan.

Both England players involved in the tackles, Jess Breach (below) and Emily Scarratt, had to leave the field to receive head injury assessments and did not return to play.

"In the second half, if you go down to 14 players against England for up to 25 minutes, it