Ireland coach Andy Farrell admitted his dressing-room was a sombre place after a desperately poor display prompted the side ranked best in the world to slump to their first home defeat in three years and 19 matches to a moderate New Zealand outfit.
But he refused to pin any blame on Nic Berry despite his side conceding 13 penalties and claimed his team needed to “get their house in order”.
“Disappointed. It’s easily summed up with the mood of the dressing-room as you expect.
“I’m gutted, we’re all gutted, it’s a sombre dressing-room. We prepped well and we were excited for the game but we didn’t put our game out on the field and obviously the opposition have a say in that.
“It’s a funny feeling because we don’t tend to have it too much in that dressing-room. That’s life, congrats to New Zealand and we move on.
“We need to find solutions as soon as we possibly can against a very hungry Argentina side who are playing really good rugby. We need to get back on the horse and start it all again, don’t we?
“We supressed ourselves at times and the energy or the accuracy wasn’t what was needed to win a big test match like that. We compounded errors.”
Asked about Berry’s performance, Farrell said: “We need to get our own house in order first. You can talk about all sorts of stuff, rustiness or game-time. But there’s no excuse. Long story short, the opposition deserved to win. As for the penalty count, the game was very stop start, there were a lot of errors. Because of the weather that came down, it was a slow enough game and we need to be looking after our own energy and we didn’t do that well enough.
“We stayed in the fight but the turning point was the penalty in the scrum, they kicked the goal and obviously it started going in their favour and it compounded thereafter.”
Ireland regained a lead after half-time but then lost that momentum just as swiftly.
“We were happy at the start of the second-half, we hadn’t fired a shot, then got momentum, but they’re quality and our discipline gave them territory and possession and they came back,” said captain Caelan Doris.
Farrell will assess some of Nic Berry’s crucial calls, including a second-half scrum penalty when Ireland lost crucial territory when seeking to build upon their lead.
“We’ll look for clarification of a few of them but it doesn’t really matter if it was wrong or right, we still should have supressed ourselves a little bit.
“It’s not right to be chasing your tail when you’ve made an error, a dropped ball or a penalty, the compound the error and then your field position is completely gone. Points come on the back of that and we did that a number of times and we need to fix our mentality on that, getting back to neutral.
“We became too desperate and the accuracy and energy weren’t what was needed.”