Despite the frustration of letting a winning position slip from their grasp, there were elements of the Irish performance that McWilliams believes can be built upon in the weeks ahead

“Credit to Wales, I thought they got on top of us physically in the second half. We struggled to exit. The yellow card [for Eimear Considine] in the last 10 minutes was tough. There’s learnings for me. As a coach, you always look to see what things you’d have done differently, and there’s certain things I’d have done differently,” McWilliams acknowledged.

“But I’m really proud of the players. I thought they showed excellent signs, when you think we only had 31% of possession. The signs were good. There’s certainly things there we can be proud of. I think our defensive shape was good. I think our energy to get back in the game and defend. We defended for such long periods of time and that does take it out of a team.” An even tougher test awaits them against France in Toulouse next weekend the coach pinpointed a number of areas they will need to work on if they are to get their Championship campaign back on track.

“There’s certainly areas that we’ll work on around our maul defence. We have to. That was an area that was exposed,” McWilliams added.

“The scrum as well, but we’ll continue to work on our scrum. I think there’s been some really good sessions being done by Rob [Sweeney, scrum coach] and the scrum is going in the right direction. You just want to get hold of the ball a bit more and hold onto it for longer periods.

“Because we’re trying to play a fast pace, they slowed it down a little bit and we need to just be bit more assertive in holding onto the ball.”