Ireland in a balancing act ahead of meeting with Wales

The break week in the Guinness Men's and Women's Six Nations will always be judged with the benefit of hindsight.

If Ireland lose against Wales this Saturday, there will be a lingering feeling that they had too long to dwell on the mistakes in the defeat to Italy on Easter Sunday. If, however, Scott Bemand's side pick up their first win of the championship, the extra few days prep will have no doubt been invaluable in picking the players back up off the ground.

For Ireland, balancing out the positives and negatives will have made for an interesting body of work in the last few days.

While their defeat to Italy was riddled with errors, they were, in theory, errors that should not be difficult to fix. Executing simple overlaps and trimming down the handling mistakes should come relatively easily on the training pitch.

And the biggest area of focus in the last week, Bemand says, has been showing the players how close they have been to executing their chances.

"There was a lot of good stuff that went on against Italy, so we sort of reminded the girls that there's some good stuff that they did, and they've got to tap into that," he said.

"Perhaps, rather than making it harder for ourselves to win games, we're going to give ourselves permission to go and convert some of that pressure into points."

The Ireland head coach says he and his management team have had to lean into "the coaching craft" in recent days as they try to shine a light on the areas for improvement, while also acknowledging the foundations that are in place.

"We've always said, we want to be a group that is honest. We looked pretty hard at it and we saw some areas of the game that we need to go after. We’ve done plenty of reflecting on it.

"We obviously had that fallow