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13th November 2018
03:13pm GMT

“It will be up to Joe (Schmidt) and Rory (Best) to figure out how he’s going to go. We have to look hard at our discipline because you can’t give away too many penalties against the All Blacks. If you look over the years, we’ve given a lot of penalties away with him (Barnes). We need to figure out why and rectify that. “We pride ourselves on our discipline. We are coached to be as disciplined as we can be. We will look at a game and after the game we will get, not in trouble but it will be highlighted where we could have given away penalties.Former Ireland internationals Kevin McLaughlin and Donncha O'Callaghan acknowledged that Barnes can be tricky to deal with. "Marginal decisions, he just tends to go against Ireland," McLaughlin told SportsJOE last year. "Everytime I watch him referee Ireland, I know it's going to be tricky." O'Callaghan added: "Unfortunately, Wayne Barnes...and its always the frustrating thing with Wayne Barnes, he's always right! It's to the letter of the law."“So our discipline, on a list of importance, is up there. We’ve come on the wrong side of Wayne Barnes in the past so it’s something we’re going to have to look at even more so this week. "We try to play by the letter of the law but for whatever reason in certain games we haven’t got that right with him. “So we really need to have a look at ourselves and see can we be extra vigilant there. We can’t be worried about them because that’s their problem. From our point of view we’ve been penalised a lot by him in the past, more so than any other ref so we really need to be wary of our own discipline this week.”
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