Johnny Sexton insists Ireland's number one ranking means nothing compared to Saturday's opponents' status as world champions.
Ireland head coach Andy Farrell last week told his players to embrace their position at the top of world rugby's pile and to go on the attack to preserve it.
But his skipper Sexton is taking a different tack heading into the Aviva Stadium clash with reigning World Cup winners South Africa, the weekend's most eagerly-anticipated Autumn series clash.
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The veteran out-half believes that the only time the rankings really count is for the seedings when the World Cup draw is made.
And he feels it is strange that happens almost three years out from the next World Cup - after the November international window that comes the year after the staging of the finals.
Sexton commented: "Honestly, it’s not something we talk about that much.
"It’s not a goal to become number one in the world. That might sound stupid, in some sports it is, like golf or tennis but in rugby the rankings matter once and it's like three years out from the World Cup when they matter, which doesn't make that much sense either.
"But you don't speak about being....to be number one in the world, you need to win the World Cup, that's where the goals are.
"Obviously you want to be the best in Europe, you want to win the Six Nations, so those sort of goals have nothing to do with being world number one.
"I don't think too many teams read too much into it, I know the other teams will probably refer to us now, trying to put pressure on us, but we don't speak about it."
In terms of the significance of Saturday's clash, Sexton claims the important thing is that Ireland learn plenty from the encounter given that the sides will meet on September 23 at the Stade de France in their final group game at the 2023 Rugby World Cup.
"Yeah look, if we got a win on Saturday it would be great, if we don't then we learn from it," he said.
"We're going to learn both ways. We're going to learn about South Africa, we're going to see what it's like to play against this type of team, we haven't played against them in a few years and I think it's what we need.
"They're in our group at the World Cup and we have to make sure we take the learnings from it, win, lose or draw, but we're going in there to try and win the game, don't get me wrong."
Sexton added: "Obviously we have to give them the respect that they absolutely deserve. They're the best team in the world in terms of they're world champions.
"They're a top-class team. They've obviously won the World Cup, they beat the Lions and had some big results over the last few years so in terms of testing ourselves it's huge.
"How we can get a result, we need to bring our game and make sure we do it even better because when you have a couple of results like we did in the summer teams start properly look at you and they go, 'how are we going to mess up this Ireland team? How are we going to combat this?'.
"And we've got to do it better and we've got to evolve a little bit and make sure we bring something new to the table."
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