Ireland secured the Triple Crown with a 27-18 chaotic win against Wales at the Principality stadium and keep their hopes of a grand slam alive. Tries from Jack Conan and Jamie Osborne were paired with 17-points from fly half Sam Prendergast to see out a spirited Wales performance to maintain Ireland’s 100% record in the 2025 Guinness Six Nations.
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Interim Irish head coach Simon Easterby was joined by Dan Sheehan who stepped into the role as skipper for an injured Caelan Doris in the post-match press conference at the Principality stadium. Both were pleased with their sides results but also understood it wasn’t an easy victory.
5 Talking points Wales 18-27 Ireland- 2025 Mens Guinness Six Nations.
1. Easterby pleased with the result but admits it wasn’t perfect.
A triple crown win sounds pleasant on the face of things but for portions of the game Ireland were frustrated by a Welsh side many were expecting the visitors to blow away and run in an easy win. However, it was anything but simple for the Irish.
Simon Easterby: “[I’m] Pleased with the result. There’s lots of things in the game that we will feel like we could have done better, but we go down a man and then we go down on the scoreboard. Came in at half time and felt like if we played in the right way and sort of did things better our way then, then we felt like we could dominate them with a lot of possession for 30 minutes, a lot of territory for 30 minutes. [We] just didn’t quite get our accuracy right in terms of scoring the points that we needed and we knew that Wales would come back into it if we gave them an opportunity.” Easterby said.
2. Sheehan full of pride following call up to captain
Dan Sheehan was promoted to Ireland’s skipper after Caelan Doris was ruled out through injury and relished the opportunity to lead his country.
“Incredible privilege to be able to lead that bunch of men. You know, there’s probably anyone in that team could have led it and there’s a lot of big leaders in the team. So yeah, it was a huge honor to be given the opportunity to lead the side this week and a tough one to lead during today.
“But that’s exactly what we talk about all week is preparing for the moments when things aren’t going your way and how can we can stay during those moments and get ourselves out of it. So yeah, tricky game and nice to get out on the right side.” Sheehan said.
3. Sheehan lauds praise onto Ireland’s preparation in the build-up to Wales clash
Sheehan was proud of how his side prepared for todays fixture with the young hooker highlighting the importance of fine-tuning their approach for Wales.
“We do a lot of our prep during the week. We do all our sort of detail and all our talking early on the week so that we can sort of prepare ourselves just mentally over the last few days has been just sort of finding the right balance and finding the right intent.
“I thought the intent was there, but as Simon said, the accuracy probably slacked a little bit and we sort of had to regroup at times to make sure we really focused. It got better towards the sort of last 30 minutes thought some of the lads off the bench had a massive impact. Bundee [Aki] and James Ryan coming off the bench gave us huge energy, so I think that was a difference.” said Sheehan.
4. Easterby jumps to Ringrose’s defence after controversial red card.
Garry Ringrose was shown a yellow card for a high hit on Ben Thomas just before half time. The yellow was sent for bunker review where it was revealed before the second half there had been an upgrade to a red card. But many on social media believed it should have been a straight red card but Easterby had a differing view.
“Listen, those can go either way and Garry [Ringrose] a brilliant player for us. Everything he does is with intent in terms of the speed at which he works at and that’s probably what’s cost him there, is just the the speed of his movement off the line and he just doesn’t quite drop enough and you know he’s certainly far from a dirty player.
“It’s just one of those things that that happens, you know, it could have gone either way, it could have been a yellow there was another incident later in the game which could have gone either way and it didn’t go fall in our favor.” Said Easterby.
5. Easterby praises Wales’ Matt Sheratt but criticises media’s approach to todays game.
Easterby was full of praise for Sheratt who took charge of Wales for the first of his three matches as interim head coach after Warren Gatland’s departure. Easterby was quick to point out the media’s attitude being too negative leading up to the game
“I think there’s been some really kind of just poor media talk around Wales and the state of the game and et cetera. We knew that they would be a tough opposition today. We knew that they would play with the type of passion and you look at some of the tries they scored that even the one that Ellis [Mee] didn’t score in the corner, they have the ability to play well and and play with ball in hand and they made us work really hard for it. so Matt’s [Sheratt] done a brilliant job.
We knew the game would be a lot tougher than maybe some people in the media suggested and it panned out that way.” Said Easterby
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