Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

No Carter took a sabbatical at the end of the November international in 2013. Took 6 months off and was back for the rugby championship in 2014.

Possibly but it was fairly obvious that he was having a go at the officials despite some trying to claim nothing to see here when it was first raised.

Are we talking about that on this thread or another?

recovery from injury.

Oh yeah look I'm not commenting on what did or did not happen. Moreso commenting on EPCRs mess of proving explicitly what happened to a level that could be punished under a broad "misconduct" heading.

No way you spend all that time and money on both sides, and miraculously come up with "3" as the magic number that's really deserving for the action taken, just so happens to match the number of warm-ups, and has such wishy washy phrasing in the official statement. Not a great look for it all just to end up being backroom dealing, and the disciplinary process itself basically a load of bollocks.

To quote another part of the report, the factual findings section:

Incident 2 (the one with the young child - his son):

Incident 3:

Also note that the third incident was decided to not be misconduct. I'm surprised the second one (which was disputed and not accepted as misconduct by Sexton/Leinster) was too, but that's not up to me.

[edit - I have edited my post to be less confrontational]

Quote from the judgment:

"96. The evidence from Ireland’s Head Coach, which was not disputed by EPCR, is that JS “will be involved in the 3 warm up games that we have coming up”. Since JS has been “out of the game through injury since the 18th March 2023 we feel that this would be the minimum number of games that he will need to be match fit for the start of the Rugby World Cup”. 

97. He is fit to play. That was the evidence from Dr Ciaran Cosgrove, Ireland’steam doctor, again not disputed by EPCR. 

98. Therefore, we are satisfied that JS would, but for his suspension, be fit to play in and be selected for those matches."

Are they seriously the Irish world cup kits!? They're atrocious!

So basically incident number two is,

Sexton said something near the officials, which they didn't hear, and no one else heard, they don't know what he said, but they are going to go ahead and assume it was about the officials and that it was bad.

That seems like very flimsy evidence

It's really not a good look for our captain. Abuse of referees should not be tolerated. And it wasn't in the heat of the match or anything like that so he has no excuse. Probably should have been a longer ban.

Kudos to the committee for working in the "won't someone please think of the children" angle. (seriously though, it's obvious they mention it just to be able to distinguish each event, they're not actually judging his parenting)

Read through the decision, it's pretty reasonable, but think there would have plenty of grounds to challenge had the sanction been more severe. If Sexton had simply denied the charge, all the evidence would have been pretty circumstantial.

A good outcome for all sides IMO. Sexton gets a richly deserved ban, but not so severe that Ireland need to freak out about it.

I think a change in captaincy would probably be wise to be honest. Sexton would still be a hugely important leader within the group. But I think having someone else interacting with the referee would be a smart move. Referees are human and I don't think they will be 100% impartial with Sexton after this whole fiasco. If say we get Peyper for the quarter final, that could be a big problem for us.