Andrew Porter believes it's not up the Ireland management to get players in the right mindset ahead of games.
In the wake of Saturday's heavy defeat to England, boss Joe Schmidt did not hold back in his criticism of the performance.
Among the words used by the New Zealander were "dishevelled", "flat", "slow," "inaccurate", "unacceptable" and "malaise".
They missed 34 tackles on the way to shipping 57 points.
Asked whether the coaches have a duty to ensure the players are at the right pitch in terms of mindset, Porter told RTÉ Sport: "There is only so much coaches can do. A lot of it would be player-led in terms of getting your mind right for the game.
"We have certain sessions where the coaches would encourage us to do our visualisation, off the pitch and stuff like that but it would be down to the players in that sense.
"Going into the game, the mindset was there, the emotion [was right], obviously it's a huge game, Ireland versus England, but I think in the first 20 minutes we were just fairly close, 8-7.
"It was more so errors and then compounding errors on top of more errors, it's just that.
"For a few lads it was their first game back. Whether or not it was rustiness or something like that, it's something we'll really try to move on from, and you take your learnings from it, but you can't really be dwelling on it too much because there's a another big game coming up."
Leinster front rower Porter, 23, won his 16th cap as a replacement against England, and is likely to make the 31-man Rugby World Cup squad, which will be picked on Sunday, given his versatility either side of the scrum.
He is one of 12 players who has seen action in the two warm-up games to date.
"Obviously there is no good time for what happened last weekend to happen but sure it's better to happen now than in a few weeks in Japan," he added, 26 days out from Ireland's opening Pool A game against Scotland.
"It will be great this weekend to get that momentum going, we'll obviously try to push on from last week anyway and put out our best performance. I think it's really important to do that in terms of getting momentum going into the World Cup.
"I think if we can put a marker down this weekend it would be really good when we get to Japan and especially before we play Wales again in two weeks time."
Porter’s Leinster team-mate James Ryan, who has been rested up to this point, dismissed the suggestion that the imminent departure of Schmidt, who announced his intention to step down after the World Cup, at the end of 2018, has had any role to play in the team’s poor run of form this year.
"No, I don't feel it to be honest," said the lock, Ireland’s player of the year last season.
"I think half of us forget it sometimes with what's going on at the moment. I think we've got to look at it much more specifically and think what's going wrong.
"It's not because of that stuff, it's because we need to be sharper at the lineout, it's because our defence needs to be better, it's because our attack needs to be more fluid.
"It's a combination of those things as opposed to who is leaving and all that."
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