Stuart McCloskey and Tadhg Beirne both in line to play in Ireland’s Nations Championship opener

Despite some players missing the end of the domestic season with injuries, the 36-man Ireland squad have all been training fully in Sydney ahead of next Saturday’s opening Nations Championship game against Australia at a sold-out Allianz Stadium.

This includes Stuart McCloskey and Tadhg Beirne, who have recovered from the torn hamstring and knee injury which cut short their Ulster and Munster campaigns.

“Everyone is training and trained hard and trained well today. So, everyone’s fine,” said forwards coach Paul O’Connell from the squad’s hotel, not far from Sydney Opera House.

“It’s a great hotel, it’s a good location,” added O’Connell. “We arrived on Tuesday evening. And Wednesday morning, we got the ferry to Manly. We had a nice morning out there. And the weather was beautiful, a lot better than it’s been in the last few days.

“So, it kicked us off nicely. We have a gym across the road. We’re training in Leichhardt Oval, which is a little bit of a bus drive, but it’s a beautiful training ground. And we’ve been lucky enough with the weather when we’ve trained as well. So, it’s good.

“We have tomorrow off. I think some of the lads are going to the rugby league this evening. A few lads are going out for dinner. So, yeah, it’s been good. It’s a great city to be touring in.”

As well as facing the Wallabies, Ireland will also play Japan in Newcastle and New Zealand in Auckland in this inaugural biennial competition. Technically this makes these games “competitive” matches per se, although O’Connell maintained it retains much of the feel of the traditional tours.

“It feels like a summer tour, really, and I think it’s exciting to have a competition. And we certainly want to be at the business end of it come November. But it feels like a tour and that’s what we’re trying to make it like. I think you learn a lot about each other as a group.

“You develop a little bit more on tour because you’re not going home at the weekend. You’re not catching up with your family at the weekend. You’re together all the time. So, we tend to get an awful lot of work done when we’re on tours.

“We tend to, I think, take big strides as a team in terms of trying to improve and evolve. So, even though it’s a competition, it feels like, and we’re probably treating it like a tour.”

Nevertheless, it all adds to the demands on players at the end of another long hard season, with the Irish squad staying in the same hotel where last summer’s Lions squad were based in Sydney. Only time will tell, but O’Connell believes that the Irish system’s game management will counter any danger of fatigue.

“The game minutes aren’t massive with a lot of the lads, actually. Even though a lot of them started quite late. For some of the guys, their first game of the season was against New Zealand in November.

“There’s a few guys that have been injury-free all year. They’ll probably have a few more games under their belt than the others. But some guys have picked up knocks throughout the year, which isn’t ideal, but it gives them a little bit of a break.

“A physical break, but maybe it gives them a mental break as well, because that’s probably the big thing. It isn’t necessarily the games. It’s that the games are all big games that they play these days.

“Whether they’re internationals, or big European games, or big derby games, or big URC games towards the end of the season, or big games down in South Africa. There’s no soft touches any more, so that’s the challenge for a lot of them.

“From my impression of the lads since they’ve come in, the eagerness to work, the eagerness to train, the eagerness to do the work has been great,” added O’Connell.

“We trained for the first time yesterday. Sometimes you can judge how things are on the laptop in the afternoon with big numbers of boys sitting together on laptops watching training together, getting realigned.

“The enthusiasm is great and I think they’re excited to be away. It’s always a change when you come abroad on tour and you’re in a different hotel, in a different city, in something different. I think they’re in good shape and in good form.”