Irish head coach Joe Schmidt has said that his squad's strength will be in how they react after the 19-12 defeat to hosts Japan in Pool A of the Rugby World Cup.
Leading 12-9 at the interval, Ireland were utterly impotent after the restart as they failed to register a single score.
Schmidt, clearly frustrated at full-time, focused on taking some positives from the loss.
"It's a tough defeat for us to take but I think the strength of the team will be how they respond and how they rebound from this.
"A six-day turnaround into this game was a little bit tough and we've got a five-day turnaround until the Russian game so that will be another challenge for us."
Schmidt also addressed questions on whether more changes should have been made during the clash:
"I think the players like CJ and James Ryan were still delivering at the end.
"I think we tried to have a very easy start of the week, we had a light training on Tuesday, our only really full training was on Thursday so those players felt really well recovered.
"Because we had a few changes in the backline we wanted to keep a little bit of continuity up front and that was the decision you make.
"I think hindsight is always an advantage but I'm not sure we would have done it too differently."
Ireland face Russia in their next Pool A encounter on Thursday and Schmidt feels such a quick turnaround could be tricky.
"We've gotta be better at what we're doing and we've gotta demonstrate that in five days time."
"We're not gonna get a lot of time to put anything together.
"I think we're doing an open session on Tuesday and that will be the only training we'll have in the lead up to Russia who have already proved themselves to be very, very physical and very competitive, they stayed in the game for a long time with the Japanese."
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