Eamonn Sweeney charts the rehabilitation of Irish rugby since their Six Nations win over England in The Sunday Independent.
"Irish rugby seems to have been sucked into some kind of strange science fiction-style time warp. Because while in normal life March 12 is less than three months ago, in rugby it seems to belong to a different age altogether.
"March 12 was the day when referee Jonathan Kaplan and touch judge Peter Allan's failure to do their job properly enabled Welsh scrum-half Mike Phillips to score a blatantly illegal match-winning try against Ireland at the Millennium Stadium. Messrs Kaplan and Allan had combined to produce an all-time classic of awful officiating.
"The media consensus held that the illegality of the winning score was largely irrelevant. Ireland's loss was seen as incontrovertible evidence that Declan Kidney had lost the plot, that the team was in decline, that we had fallen far behind an England team motoring inexorably towards the Grand Slam, that our own Grand Slam of 2009 was the glorious finale of a golden era which might not come again for some time."
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