Keith Wood believes Jonny Sexton's Ireland team-mates need to step up if the fly-half is not on his game.
He also felt Ireland were "too narrow" against Wales as he joined Off The Ball to review the Six Nations defeat in Cardiff and to address the lessons to be learned before the Scotland game.
"I thought we were too narrow. It's one of the parts from Ireland's play from the past two or three years where we have great ball carriers and we run one-out runners. I don't like it. We're better able to run from depth at different angles than just to bang it on in there," he said.
Sexton was below par in Cardiff, but Keith is confident that the Racing Metro out-half will be more dependable in future games.
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"I think there were a few mistakes made by the coach. Some of the game-plan, which has been fantastic, revolved almost entirely around our No 10 and he had an off day. We haven't seen [Sexton] play as poorly and the view would be he wouldn't play as poorly again. I think the coach will learn more from that fact that he needs to have more in the locker and not just to be that dependent on him," said Keith, who also feels that other players need to "step up".
"If he is targeted, kept out of the game and he has an off-game, other players need to step up."
The former Ireland captain also addressed the backlash from Wales fans after he admitted his confidence that Ireland would win pre-game.
"It had the Western Mail describe it with a huge banner headline that 'Wood says easy victory' which is not actually what I said. Maybe if they had read the rest of the article they might have said that's what I thought would happen," he said.
"Do you know what? I got it exactly wrong and I don't think we played well enough. I'm quite happy to take the slagging."
The Irish Times' Gerry Thornley was also alongside Keith tonight and admitted that he is bemused by the feelings towards Wales head coach Warren Gatland in Ireland and thinks that his side "did a number" on Joe Schmidt's previously in-form team.
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