JOHNNY ALMOST SUBBED BEFORE LAST-GASP HEROICS
JOE SCHMIDT has revealed that Johnny Sexton was almost taken off before scoring the winning drop goal.
With the last kick of the game, Sexton snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in Paris.
But the fly-half had gone down with cramp 10 minutes before he gloriously crowned a 41-phase rescue act.
Joey Carbery was poised to replace Sexton, until the matchwinner indicated he could continue. Paying tribute to his players, Ireland coach Schmidt (below) said: “It had ticked over the 80 minutes and the game was all but dead and buried.
“So it was unbelievably accurate, hard-working and skilful to achieve what they did.
“To work from a drop-out 22, 16 metres out from your own line, for Iain Henderson to take that and for us to build the phases from there.
“To have the audacity to have a cross-kick involved and for Keith Earls to make no contest of it – he was going to claim that no matter what – that showed clarity of thought. “Then some of the appeals to the referee when guys were lying in the way, made it look to me that it was going to be impossible. “My thoughts were that we could not score a try with rucks. “But that didn’t stop Johnny knocking over a drop goal. Four years ago when we won the Six Nations title here, it was the other way round, where we were hanging on for the win. To leap up and claim the win like we did certainly hasn’t happened – not in recent times anyway.”
France are to be investigated over their use of head injury assessment (HIA) protocols.
Fly-half Matthieu Jalibert and scrum-half Antoine Dupont went off with knee injuries and were also listed as requiring HIAs.
When Dupont left the field in the dying minutes, starting scrum-half Maxime Machenaud was allowed to return to the field, which would not have been allowed without an HIA.