Ireland rugby coach Joe Schmidt has revealed 'time' was of the essence in deciding who to select for Sunday's World Cup opener against Scotland in Yokohama.
Kick off on Sunday is at 8.45am Irish time.
Rob Kearney, Keith Earls and Joey Carbery are not in the match day squad with a view to them being sharp for the second pool game against Japan tomorrow week.
So the back three will be Jordan Larmour at full-back, with Andrew Conway and Jacob Stockdale on the flanks.
The trio have started 52 tests between them, only joining up once before, for a 54-7 win over Italy in November 2018.
Schmidt says that being advanced in training was crucial to his thinking:
"It was really just that we were getting very tight for time, and the best continuity we had was to have the guys who trained through the time that we've been here. That's what we went with and it's exciting to have the back three that we've got as well. It's a great opportunity and a fantastic challenge for them."
The coach has given his vote of confidence for the trio to deliver:
"I think that their enthusiasm is something that's contagious. Andrew has proven he has real aerial ability and that will be really useful for us. I still have the vision in my mind clearly of Jordan Larmour beating Israel Folau to a ball in the third test in Sydney on our Australian tour in the middle of last year. He's very good there as well and Jacob of course is a big man in the backfield. They're all feeding off each other, they're all young men who are very keen to impress. I guess they've now got that opportunity."
And Schmidt joked when asked if he had anything up his sleeve to help see off the Scots:
"Short sleeves. Not too much up my sleeves! Again, there's certainly things that you do hold back a bit. I have no doubt that we'll see something from Scotland that we haven't seen before, because we've been planning this for a long time. When you get the opportunity to put it into practice, it still has to be put into practice accurately and one of the things that gets in the way of that is the amount of pressure the opposition can put on you. And I have no doubt both teams will be trying to put pressure on each other so that whatever they have got planned isn't quite as effective as they'd hoped."
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