The 'turning point' Andy Farrell rued in Ireland's All Blacks loss

Fair play to Andy Farrell. Offered an invite on Friday night to let off steam over the performance of referee Nic Berry, he ignored the bait and instead fessed up that his Ireland team simply weren’t good enough to bag the win the desired against the All Blacks.

That was mature and very welcome in this era where the officials are easily sprayed. It didn’t mean that all reference to a major talking point was off the table; it just showed there are different ways in delivering your message.

The statistical reality was that the much fancied Irish had taken a hammering on the penalty count, conceding 13 penalties to just five New Zealand infringements, and it was the difference between winning and losing as Damian McKenzie made hay, landing six of his seven penalty kicks directed at the poles.

This accuracy left the tourists comfortable victory as Ireland, who led 13-9 three minutes into the second half after a converted Josh van der Flier try, couldn’t kick on from there with their momentum pierced by the flow of penalties and a bench that malfunctioned rather than add some badly needed energy.

“The turning point was the crucial penalty from the scrum and they kicked the goal. It obviously started going in their favour and we compounded that after,” rued Farrell, referencing the 62nd minute set-piece where Ireland got the shove on only be whistled for doing so illegally.

There will be questions asked; there always is. But the head coach wasn’t playing a blame game with Berry in the crosshairs. “We’ll get a few answers in regards to clarification of a few of them [the penalty decisions].

“But it doesn’t really matter whether it was wrong or right, we still should have supressed ourselves a little bit.

“It’s not right to try and be desperate, chasing a tail when you have made an error, whether it be a penalty or a dropped ball and compound that error with another error and all of a sudden field position is gone and points come on the back of that – and we did that a number of times.

“We need to fix up our mentality as far as that is concerned, get it back to neutral and get in after the ball that we wanted. We became a little bit too desperate and on the back of that, the energy wasn’t what was needed or the accuracy.”

For sure, they will be looking at themselves in the mirror. “We have to get our own house in order first. There is no excuses for us,” continued Farrell, whose Irish team are next in action on Friday when Argentina, who shared a Rugby Championship series 1-1 with the All Blacks in New Zealand in July, pitch up in Dublin.

“You can talk about all sorts of stuff. Rustiness or game time, there is no excuse. It is what it. Long story short, the opposition deserved to win.”

“As far as the penalty count, I actually thought the game was stop start, it was a bit scrappy. There was a lot of errors because of the weather a little bit that came down but it was a slow enough game at times. We needed to be in charge of looking after our own end and we didn’t do that well enough.”

That was a fair shout by the fair-minded coach after what was a massively deflating defeat.