Ireland could be without a host of senior players for next week's final Autumn series clash with Australia.
Andy Farrell was always going to make changes for Saturday's encounter with Fiji at the Aviva Stadium.
However speaking this afternoon after announcing a line-up that shows nine changes from last week's rousing victory against South Africa - and five more on the bench - the head coach gave an indication of the casualty list that has come out of that heavyweight tussle.
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Asked if those left out of the squad for this week are injured or being rested, Farrell didn't go into specifics.
However what he did say will concern Ireland fans with the Wallabies clash in mind.
"Yeah, most of them...they’re all injured," said Farrell.
"If you want to go through it, Johnny (Sexton) is banged up with a bad dead leg.
Josh (van der Flier) has got something going on there, so has James Ryan, Hugo (Keenan) is banged up, Ports (Andrew Porter) is banged up.
"Hendy (Iain Henderson), obviously we know about him, he’s not played yet and then you can go on with the rest of them, Earlsy (Keith Earls) and Bundee (Aki, who is suspended until next week) etc.
“So there’s a few injuries there but again it is what it is and this type of thing is going to happen constantly.
"Certainly within a World Cup period, certainly when you get down to games three and four, hopefully five and six, you know what I mean?
"So, it’s good for us.”
Asked if any of the injuries are particularly serious, Farrell replied: “Well, we’ll have to see.
"Some of them are impact injuries but some are serious enough, so we’ll see how they improve.
"Most of them have done nothing this week, they’ve been in the rehab and physio rooms.
"So we’ll see how they cope next week.”
There will be pressure on the players coming in such as new cap Jeremy Loughman and relative newcomers Jimmy O'Brien and Nick Timoney, plus the likes of Joey Carbery at out-half, to step up and keep the momentum going that was built over the second half of the Six Nations into the New Zealand tour and last week's big victory.
“You could talk about it in all sorts of ways," said Farrell.
"But the only thing that matters is our own expectation of ourselves and our performance, we’re another week into it so we expect a good performance.
“It doesn’t matter that we’ve got nine changes in the starting line-up or five on the bench.
"They’ve got a responsibility for the team because every single one of them understands that it’s team first in our environment.
“When you pull the shirt on you’ve got an opportunity to make that team better and that’s the only thing that matters to us.”
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