In the second game of their series, Ireland men avenged last week’s 24-0 shutout by Wales at the Knoll with a convincing 38-12 victory at Featherstone’s Millenium Stadium. The Wolfhounds ran in eight tries, two in eight first half minutes to young Huddersfield winger Connor Carr.

“I’m extremely pleased, I knew the performance was there, we just left it on the bus last week,” enthused Ireland head coach Ged Corcoran. “We spoke about it in depth, and the result is because the lads were determined to fix things up. We’ve got a couple of things in mind for next year, but we need an active schedule for the senior men for the next 36 months and we’ll be talking about that in the next few weeks.”

Ireland made a blistering start, scoring at a point-a-minute in taking a 26-0 lead. They made a number of positional changes and brought players three in – Zac McComb, Pat Moran and Warrington’s Joe Philbin – and it paid off, Dan Corcoran drawing first blood for them after just three minutes as he went in down the left.

Despite the swirling wind, Carr raced onto a superb kick to the left corner to extend the lead and Brendan O’Hagen collected Ronan Michael’s offload to go over between the posts, Corcoran converting.

Carr posted his second after fast hands set him free and Oliver Whitford sliced through the middle, Swinton’s Aaron Lynch completing the early blitz.

Somewhat against the run of play, Owen Restall’s 40 metre dash down the right got Wales off the mark, Matty Fozard adding a towering conversion which narrowed the gap to 26-6 at the break.

Ireland started the second half strongly as O’Hagen bagged his second shortly after the break, but Wales’ defence improved, with Sam Bowing, Matt Ross and Huw Worthington getting through a huge amount of work and setting the position for hooker Denive Bamforth to show and go for their second score just after the hour.

Ireland had the last word, winger Lewis Wing winning the race to a kick to the line.

“I was really disappointed with the first half, we didn’t get ourselves a chance,” claimed Wales head coach Paul Berry. “We needed half time to have a reset and talk about what we’d practiced. Our inexperience showed and after that we looked much better. We’ve deliberately picked a group of players that are going to be with us for the next three to four years and while the performance wasn’t the best, there’s plenty of positives including two 17-year-olds who did not look out of place.”