Frawley: We can step up a notch
Daire Walsh
Ireland U20 centre Ciaran Frawley hopes to leave England feeling green on St Patrick’s night in Dublin.
The hosts are out of the reckoning for Six Nations Championship honours but they can still ruin the visitors’ dream of a first Grand Slam since 2011.
And Frawley is confident his side has the talent and wherewithal to be party-poolers in Donnybrook.
“We still want to make an impression,” explained Frawley. “We haven’t played to our full potential yet, but I believe we can. We can step it up another notch at home on St Patrick’s Day.
He admitted: “It would be good spoil that [Grand Slam] but we’re worrying about ourselves as well. We just want to perform. We haven’t performed to our capabilities yet.”
Last Saturday’s 41-27 defeat to Wales in Colwyn Bay brought Ireland’s title aspirations to an end undoing the good work of previous victories over Scotland, Italy and France.
Having worked their way back to level terms from a 14-point deficit, Frawley feels a lack of focus was a contributing factor in their eventual downfall to the Welsh. And the Skerries man revealed that the squad zoned in on the negative aspects of the performance in Monday’s video review.
“It was a huge disappointment. We were down 14 points at one stage, and we brought it back. They got a disallowed try, and we thought we had it in our favour at one stage. It just came from one mistake near the halfway line, and that kind of knocked on to a few more errors. It could have been won, but we just let it slip. We had our video analysis, and we took a lot of the negatives from it. We build on them, and then hopefully apply it into the game this weekend.”