Senior coach John McKee says Ireland can't go chasing tries in Saturday's TikTok Women's Six Nations finale against Scotland in Edinburgh.
Ireland need to beat Scotland and score four tries along the way to realistically stand a chance of avoiding the wooden spoon, having only crossed for two tries so far in the tournament.
As well as the matter of pride, Ireland will be eager to avoid sixth place in order to keep alive their chances of getting into Tier 2 of the WXV competition later this year. As things stand, a bottom place finish would see Ireland drop into Tier 3, while fifth place would see them take on Spain in a playoff.
"It is very important, we'd certainly much rather be in Tier 2 than Tier 3," McKee said.
However, despite the sense of urgency around when Ireland's attack will finally come alive, McKee says they need to keep their composure and build their score accordingly.
"Where we are today what we got to do is make sure we bring a winning performance.
"First and foremost we got to win the game and then maybe look at bonus point, or whatever, to climb up the ladder. But we don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves and think about how many points we’ve got to score or how many tries we’ve got to score. First and foremost, let’s win the game. Put ourselves in a winning position and then we at the back end of the game we can really, really go after it.
"We've already alluded to that we haven’t been scoring a lot of tries. We certainly can’t think we’re going to play Barbarians rugby and score a whole pile of tries. We’ve got to really try to squeeze the opposition, control field position and build the pressure. That’s how we’re going to bring a winning performance."
Ireland's maul has impressed, and could be their major attacking threat in Edinburgh, but getting into a position to maul has been an issue, with constant issues at the lineout, something McKee is keen to fix.
"Our attack hasn't been as good as we would hope. Partly, that’s because we haven’t been able to exert enough pressure in the right parts of the field.
"It goes back to probably our lineout. Our scrum’s been quite good, we’re winning reasonable ball from our scrum. The way the game is now there’s more lineouts, that’s more a source of ball. So really, to have the backs confidence that we’re going to win good quality ball, and we can control some field position and build our attack on the basis of that."
The experienced former Fiji men's coach was appointed as senior coach to the Ireland women's team over the winter, having initially worked with the squad on last summer's tour of Japan.
While things haven't necessarily gone according to plan for the New Zealand native, who also worked with Connacht between 2002 and 2005, he says he's enjoying his first major job in the women's game.
"I think the woman's game is progressing very, very quickly. The opposition in the Six Nations, everyone has evolved their campaign last year, how much stronger the teams are this year, and I think it’s a reflection of probably the work that’s going in and the various competitions that the players play in.
"France and England are probably ahead of the pack a little bit in that way because they have such a depth of players coming from strong competitions and as we can see the other unions, Wales are jumping ahead, Scotland getting a win on the weekend after a string of losses.
"I think the competition is getting stronger. It's up to us now to probably not dwell too much on the big picture and really focus on what we can bring this weekend. And making sure that we go to Scotland with the right mindset and really look to bring a winning performance," he added.
