Ireland and British & Irish Lions first five-eighths Johnny Sexton believes thinking about the team and not about the players who make it up led to Ireland's 14-46 loss to the All Blacks in their Rugby World Cup quarter-final.
Ireland had gone to Japan last year looking to advance beyond the quarterfinals for the first time at a World Cup, especially after having beaten the All Blacks twice in the years before, the 2017 Chicago win being their first win over New Zealand in 113 years.
Sexton said in their preparation they had looked too much at the sides they had beaten on those two earlier occasions rather than the All Blacks team that turned up for the World Cup.
They had beaten South Africa, the eventual winners, in their opening game of the tournament and would bow out to England in the semifinal a week later. But the side had been a different one and looked more dangerous. They had transferred Beauden Barrett to fullback while George Bridge and Sevu Reece had replaced Ben Smith and Rieko Ioane on the wings.
"If you go to the New Zealand quarter-final when the team that you have analysed and you think you've got the beating of – and you know you had them the last two times you played them [sic] – and in many ways, you maybe should have beaten them by more than the last two times.
"And suddenly you come out and just start [against] a different team, a different beast.
"That could be one that maybe we should have gone and looked at as individual as opposed to teams and realised what we were up against.
"Hindsight is a great thing when you are talking about analysis. Everyone's a genius in hindsight," he said.
Sexton confirmed during an Irish Rugby Football Union conference that while 35 he was still looking to continue playing.
The lockdown had given him a chance to reflect on the lessons from his career and reviving some aspects of his game he had overlooked to bring out when he returns to play.
"One good thing for me is that it's given me a bit of a taste of what retirement might be like and I don't want to retire any time soon," he said.
He's been inspired by a book he was given, Play On by Jeff Bercovici, a book about how top athletes played into their late 30s and early 40s.
"I'm reading it like the Bible at the moment and taking in every bit of it.
"My wife's trying to throw it in the bin every chance she gets but it's been a good time from that point of view, trying to sort of start again," he said.