Despite a tumultuous season, clinching Champions Cup place

The three-times Six Nations title-winning coach made the comments after Leinster’s Joey Carbery announced on Thursday that he would be leaving his home province for Munster in order to get more game time in his preferred 10 jersey.

With Johnny Sexton the obvious first choice at the RDS, Carbery had been getting the vast majority of his minutes at fullback especially since the emerging talents of Ross Byrne came to the fore this season.

Ulster, who have lost the services of Paddy Jackson, Stuart Olding and their initial short-term replacement Christian Leali’ifano during 2018, were in obvious need of an out-half option.

That was the suggested destination when Carbery, largely advised by his father, met with Schmidt in a Dublin coffee shop last month.

Having indicated he may be amenable to moving north, during a time when Ulster passed on the option of signing an imported 10, once Munster showed an interest the 22-year-old was always more keen on Limerick.

“The initial meeting, with Leo (Cullen — Leinster coach), myself and David Nucifora, was not the best timing for any of us,” Schmidt explained.

“It certainly wasn’t where I wanted to be at the time but I had a job to do and all we asked was could we ask if there was any interest for Joey or for Ross Byrne to go up to Ulster.

“Because Ulster were looking at the time at a foreign option, they needed to know by midday the following day and so we had to see if there was any chance at all that one of our local number 10s were interested.

“If there was no interest, then it was a different story but there was a bit of interest from Joey at the time.

“Then he mulled that over and I think he got an approach from Munster in the interim and it kind of digressed then into a different conversation.

“The initial question I posed to Joey was ‘have you any interest in going up to Ulster?’ The Munster equation came later.

“The decision was a little bit of a surprise to me. I honestly wasn’t sure what he was going to do.

“I thought he was quite possibly going to stay put.”

With Carbery in the mix, there