THE wind. You couldn't go ten seconds in Lansdowne Road without thinking about it yesterday. "A day more suited to sailing than rugby, " quipped Italy's coach, the laidback Kiwi, John Kirwan.

Eddie O'Sullivan was no different. After Friday's workout, he described the old ground as "a wind tunnel";at yesterday's post-match press conference he felt it was "even worse than I expected".

In a way though, that made this win even sweeter. The conditions meant taking on the Italians toe-to-toe. It all measured up into the kind of game ? as O'Sullivan put it himself ? "that could have gone easily against you, if you weren't tuned in mentally and physically or your tactics weren't right." On all counts, both he and his players were.

"Walking around before the game and during the warm-up, it was just incredible; there was no predicting where the ball would go.

Even then we thought we might play it to the wings early in the game to loosen up the Italian defence but any time we tried to go outside the nine it was impossible. It meant having to dog it out up front but our forwards at set-piece time and at maul time put in a lot of hard work.

"Obviously the Italians felt they had an advantage in the scrum; they threw down the gauntlet from the kick off by not kicking the ball off. I'm very happy with how the pack played, how all the boys did. It was a very difficult day for rugby yet we scored three tries. And conceded none either; that was a huge plus." It looked for a time like the Italians mightn't either. Kirwan would claim that his counterpart's body language portrayed the impression that "Eddie was a nervous man". O'Sullivan admits he was but it was his players' temperament that he was more concerned and impressed with.

"I thought we had genuine cases for a couple of penalty tries. When you don't get them, you begin to think things are going to go against you, so Malcolm [O'Kelly] plucking that lineout was just what we needed. Then Brian scored a great individual try to settle the nerves a bit. At half-time we knew the job was far from done and that we'd have to defend for long periods but we also felt there might be one chance to nail another try. When Shane [Horgan] got it, I think that was the moment Italy began to doubt they could win the game." Kirwan would admit at half-time they were feeling pretty confident that they would. O'Sullivan reckons they may have been deceived by the wind. "It was actually easier to play into the wind because you could handle it somewhat, so we decided to keep the ball in hand as much as possible, even in our own 22.

"We knew our go-to situation was to kick it out because they'd have trouble with the lineout, even if we didn't want to keep giving them field position. That involved a lot of hard work but the lads were up to the task." That task was made even harder when Brian O'Driscoll was sin-binned for his tackle on Paul Griffen. The Irish captain himself felt it was harsh. "I thought I caught him clean on the chest; it was just the fact his legs seemed to go airborne afterwards.

But sometimes you get those decisions against you, especially when you're up 19 points." He said all that with a smile, mind. Quite rightly too. Yesterday all the talk was about the wind and sin bins. This week it'll all be about Triple Crowns.