Italy will beat Ireland one day, says O'Driscoll

ROME — Despite having beaten Italy 14 times in a row, Ireland captain Brian O'Driscoll believes the Azzurri will soon get one over his team in the Six Nations, just not on Saturday.For the second year in a row these two sides open their tournament campaigns against each other but while the Irish eventually romped to a 29-11 win last time out, they believe it will be much closer this time."At some stage they're likely to beat Ireland in a Six Nations game just hopefully it won't be tomorrow," said the Ireland captain.This will be the 12th Six Nations meeting between the teams and the closest Italy have come was four years ago in Belfast when they fell by just three points before losing by a mere five the next year in Rome."They've definitely improved from my earliest memories," added O'Driscoll. "Teams give them the same respect as back then but it's a different type of respect, it's a realisation that genuinely if you don't play properly for 80 minutes against them they can turn you over."In the past definitely you felt as though you might have the upper hand in the last quarter of the game and if you keep ahead of them you could pull away in that section of the game but it definitely hasn't been the case in the last couple of years."They've managed to stay with teams an awful lot longer and they've been hugely impressive."I think the physical aspect they have to their game and they're also able to throw it around a bit and looking at some of the clips from their games from the November series they played some rugby too and put teams like Australia under pressure at times."Ireland have been hit by a number of injuries to first team players such as British Lions forwards Jamie Heaslip and Stephen Ferris but coach Declan Kidney seemed more concerned about the fact that Italy captain Sergio Parisse had recovered from a dislocated finger."Unfortunately their captain has recovered," joked Kidney. "He's a good player."We were wondering what was going to happen at number 10 and they could have gone a few ways bu

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