Boks have greater depth - Kidney

Declan Kidney: Expects a huge challenge

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• Ireland

Ireland coach Declan Kidney insists that injury has hit Ireland harder than South Africa ahead of their clash in Dublin on Saturday.

Ireland will be without several key players, amongst them stalwarts like Brian O'Driscoll, Paul O'Connell and Stephen Ferris while the Springboks are wthout the services of Bismarck du Plessis, Frans Steyn and Andries Bekker, among others.

But Kidney believes the Boks have greater depth in their playing ranks to overcome their injury list.

"The tradition of South African rugby is the set piece and the physicality they bring," he said.

"The fact they have a few bangs and knocks.....well they have 600 professional players to our 120, giving them more depth to choose from.

"They have a lot of exciting talent in their set up that we probably don't know much about.

"They're the third-best team in the world so they will be a huge challenge."

Ireland are keen to redeem themselves after a poor run in the international arena recently.

They lost their final match of the Six Nations to England before losing three successive Tests against New Zealand.

Fly-half Jonathan Sexton believes that experience against the All Blacks could help them to beat the Springboks.

"We took a lot of positives from the first Test and then learnt a lot from the second," he said.

"In that third Test we made three mistakes and were 21-0 down, then we were chasing the game which is very dangerous when you're playing the All Blacks.

"They picked us off and we've learnt from that if we ever go behind again, we'll never chase it that hard.

"If we can be in it with 20 minutes to go, well anything can happen in Test rugby.

"We're concentrating on our performance and trying to get things right when we have the ball."

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