IF you managed to avoid falling into the arms of Morpheus at lunchtime last Saturday, or whoever happened to be on the couch beside you, you'd have missed Brian Ashton's post-match interview. England and Italy had just butted heads like two hippopotamuses fighting over the last bottle of moisturiser on the subcontinent but, when asked by the nice lady from the BBC why an ambitious, flowing performance against Scotland had morphed into something a good deal more primitive seven days later, Ashton shocked everybody with his explanation. The English coach suggested that maybe his side's one-dimensional performance was his fault, that perhaps he'd focused so much on field position during the week in training that his players had been brainwashed by his emphasis. It was as honest an answer as you'll hear from a coach whose side have underperformed. Fair play to Ashton.

Fast forward 26 hours and compare Eddie O'Sullivan's post-match interview. As the nice lady from RTE gently poked him for his thoughts on the game, the best the Irish coach could come up with was that Ireland had lost because of "fate". His suggestion defied belief. If Steve Staunton came out with such an inane excuse after an Irish soccer defeat we'd be climbing all over each other to get the nearest tree to break off another branch to (metaphorically, of course) beat him across the head with.

And not only that. His post-match interview, "fate" aside, was strangely passionless. O'Sullivan has received many plaudits for not going after Steve Walsh for a couple of dodgy decisions over the course of the game, and while there may be some merit in not dishing a referee who's likely to bite back at you the next time you've got him, it would have been refreshing to see the coach work himself into a lather. Take Wigan manager Paul Jewell's reaction after a couple of bloopers by referee Phil Dowd cost his side victory over Arsenal in the Premiership on Sunday. Jewell came as close as we've probably ever witnessed on live television to popping not one, but two of his eyeballs from their sockets as he approached the referee on the final whistle and, while we wouldn't condone violence against officials in any way, shape or form, the Wigan manager's vivid passion spoke volumes for his attitude. O'Sullivan's body language, on the other hand, didn't scream winner, it appeared to portray something close to relief.

Relief that his side hadn't been beaten by 15 points as it looked like could happen at one point in the first half, relief that Ireland had given the crowd a decent run for their money, relief that he could look back at the end of the Championship after winning three or four games out of five and say that if "fate" hadn't intervened against France back in February, his side would have won the Grand Slam.

His whole attitude leaves a few prevalent questions hanging in the air. Is O'Sullivan a winner or a survivor? Is he somebody whose every living fibre strains to achieve victory or is his innerself the type that's merely content to survive?

There are two areas that need to be addressed before Saturday's game.

Firstly, Ireland need to start well. In their last 21 games, (over the course of 2005, 2006 and 2007 to date) Ireland have conceded the first score in 13 fixtures and even in a number of games they've taken the lead, (against France, Wales and Australia in 2005) they've been behind, sometimes heavily, by the half-hour mark. Just as well, then, that the players have shown a wonderful mental capacity for battling their way back into games. In the 13 fixtures they have fallen behind in, Ireland have managed to claw their way back to victory on seven occasions. This tendency to battle back into games is, obviously enough, a positive trend but it raises the question as to whether the team are being adequately prepared by their coach, both mentally and tactically, before taking the field in the first place.

We don't want to beat the coach up too much for his words - the right phrases don't always come out of everybody's mouths under the media microscope - but on Monday the reasons he offered for his side's tendency to start slow were, again, completely glib.

"I don't know to be honest, " said the coach. "I could give you a load of bluster here, and be winding you up, but I don't actually know. Sometimes it's got to do with having the ball." Mmm. That's not a very reassuring answer.

Back in June, after Ireland had lost to New Zealand for the second time in as many weeks having gone behind early on in both games, Paul O'Connell offered a more plausible explanation for Ireland's slow starts.

"We were chatting about this, " the second row said in Auckland, "asking ourselves if our warm-up is not dynamic enough, that kind of thing but I think it's a small bit of an Irish attitude. If we're playing a team we expect to beat, I don't think we'd get off to a start like we did in the second test. Maybe there's an element that you go behind and you make the brave comeback but we have to take a look at ourselves and lose that attitude. It shouldn't happen and I don't think it does happen against the weaker nations."

Now this explanation doesn't exactly go about solving the problem either but at least it was a decent attempt by O'Connell. But the point is the secondrow can afford to speculate, the coach can't. It's his job to find that extra couple of per cent to turn Ireland from nearly men to really men. Like, for example, Clive Woodward did with England at the start of the decade. The knight of the realm discovered that the first 10 minutes of the second half was consistently England's worst period in a game.

To counter this, Woodward developed a concept called "second-half thinking", a regimented procedure for getting through the half-time break. It involved things like changing shirts, pretending the score was 0-0 and visualising the kick-off while still in the dressing-room. It was slightly off-thewall stuff (well it was Woodward after all) but, once the players bought into it, it worked. Within 12 months England's post-interval period was as successful as any other period of the game. That's what O'Sullivan needs to do with Ireland's opening 10-15 minutes. That's his job.

His other is to select players in their correct positions and this is something that should come an awful lot easier.

Last weekend, before the France game, half the pundits in the country warned that playing Gordon D'Arcy at outside centre and Shane Horgan inside him at 12 was flawed. Why play two players out of position in such a crucial game when only one player needed to adjust to new surroundings?

Over the past year, Gordon D'Arcy has moulded himself into the most consistently brilliant number 12 in European rugby, possibly even the world game. His ability to beat the first tackler, be that by swerve of hip or the power of his legs, has allowed his teams, be they Ireland or Leinster, an inordinate amount of go-forward ball and his form has kept both sides in contention for honours at this point in the season.

Whereas back in February 2004 he was a winger converted to outside centre because of an injury to Brian O'Driscoll, D'Arcy is now a 12, plain and simple. He defends like a 12, attacks like a 12 and thinks like a 12. It's something that appears to have been recognised by Leinster, who started D'Arcy at 12, Horgan on the right-wing and Kieran Lewis at 13 when O'Driscoll was injured for the province's Heineken Cup pool game against Edinburgh.

In Leinster's 49-10 victory, Horgan scored a hat-trick and D'Arcy was named man-of-the-match. But when it came to O'Sullivan's turn to replace his injured captain, he decided to reinvent the wheel. D'Arcy wasn't half the influence he could have been at 13 against France, while Horgan's latent intelligence and physical presence was clearly missed on the right wing. Even when Andrew Trimble, a number 13 by trade, came on for the last 20 minutes, O'Sullivan persisted with his unbalanced centre combination. That in turn left three players out of their genuine positions. Was it a daring selection to win the game? Or a safe one designed to sneak it?

Of course, the coach isn't completely to blame for Ireland's failure to beat France. He could have done with his players being a bit more accurate with the ball in hand, for one, and their scramble defence could have been a bit more coherent on a couple of occasions, namely France's two tries. But mistakes like that will happen in the heat of the battle on the pitch. O'Sullivan's flaws last weekend - the selection mixup in the centre and the non-addressing of Ireland's longstanding inability to start games on the front positively - were all made with time as a friend.

There are no excuses for them. Which leads us back to the question. Is O'Sullivan a winner or survivor?

Saturday against England will tell a lot.