Brian O'Driscoll believes Simon Zebo's omission from the matchday squad for the final Six Nations match against Scotland could be down to committing a couple of Joe Schmidt's "pet hates".
The Off The Ball guest presenter joined us on tonight's show ahead of the Scotland game and he reviewed the defeat to Wales and looked ahead to the Scotland match tomorrow.
Listen to the full chat via the podcast:
"There's a few things that Joe is big on and one is body fight in the tackle - so when you're tackled that you fight even harder than you have been in attack. It's not his strong point," said Brian, who added that Zebo had improved at that aspect of his game nonetheless.
"I watched some of the rucks and he spilled one, he got ripped by Sam Warburton and a couple of times the ball got stuck underneath him. He ended up on his back once or twice which is a real pet hate of Joe's. Don't ever end up on your back."
Brian O'Driscoll tackled by Kelly Brown of Scotland ©INPHO/Dan Sheridan
Brian was also confident that Ireland can bounce back against the Scots, although he feels the opposition will be stiff.
"Scotland are looking at the wooden spoon. Us coming over to them, that's really their bread and butter, coming and just disrupting. They're a disruptive team. The Scotland team that I played against through the 2000s are a team of spoilers, rather than a team generating a lot of play," he said.
Looking back at the defeat to Wales, Brian also assessed the refereeing performance of Wayne Barnes.
"We didn't play him brilliantly in that the lads would have known going in and would have done analysis on Barnes and would have known that one of the really hot things is that he's going to ping someone early on, probably in the the first minute or two," said Brian.
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