"I started a joke, that started the whole world ......" | Ireland v New Zealand.

There's a lot of nonsense talk about 'We were hyping ourselves up'. Firstly who is we, also people need to understand the nature of sport and enthusiasm.

1. Andy Farrell his management team or players never hyped themselves up. They are European Champions, Series winners in New Zealand and thus one of the top 4 favourites. We never entered a World Cup as strongly. These things can't be denied and are not hype.
2. Posters on here. All the rugby core posters, Syd, Venjur, Aloof and the countless others were all optimistic but wary. We weren't a standout favourite like New Zealand in 2011 and 2015.
3. This has been a fairly dull sports year for many, the GAA inter county season is over in July, our Soccer team are at a low ebb. What was there left to build up to.. the Rugby World Cup. You had friendlies from August. A two month tournament. That's a lot of time to talk about rugby. It's not the management or team's fault July to October would be dominated in the media by Rugby World Cup talk. There's a huge cross section of people who follow all our team sports. So it was going to be rugby July on.
4. The rugby team and management are very likeable people. Andy Farrell is a decent man, with Irish roots and a working class background that a wide cross section of people relate to. He's a very popular straight talking man. His predecessors were good men too. Andrew Porter, Josh VDF, Doris, Ringrose, Aki, Furlong etc are all grounded fine young men, leaders and men with character. Sexton and O'Mahony have their edge and not everyone's cup of tea. But every team has those personalities. I saw Sexton on the Late Late in the Spring with a girl with a serious disability. She spoke of how he always kept in touch. He's a different man away from the pitch. God knows we all know people who lose it a bit on the pitch in any sport but are often fine people away from that environment.
5. If Virgin or RTE are constantly making ads about rugby, so what? Are you going to berate our team because Donal Lenihan says 'we can dare to dream'?? That's television. When Dancing With The Stars is on it's two months of ads about that. Rubbish shows like the talent ones on Virgin are advertised to death. This doesn't mean the rugby populace or the team and management are doing the hyping. That's television the world over.
6. Just adding. A miserably wet summer and autumn since July had a lot looking forward to an escape more than ever!

At the end of the day we were a top 4 team with New Zealand, France and South Africa. The 4 teams got tough draws. We played a quarter final against New Zealand we made some errors in and lost by 4 points. We fought back well from 0-13. We had a chance to win it, we were held up over the line. We lost that's sport. Anyone who has ever been involved at any level of any sport will know that. I'm not even going into explaining what a bottler is again. I was in old Lansdowne when we lost by about 50 points to New Zealand in 1997. We just keep improving. It's a long way back to 1997. A few posters have mentioned shame and embarrassment. That's, quite frankly ridiculous, and attitudes and feelings like that are owned by the individuals who typed them. They are yours and belong to nobody else. The question for you is why are you adopting a Roy Keane pre 2002 World Cup approach that anything other than outright victory is failure? Do you apply those same standards to areas of your life? Do you apply them as stringently to other sports Irish teams are involved in? If you're coming from a GAA, Soccer, Horse Racing, Boxing etc background do you apply these standards to the teams you support? Would you belittle their achievements if similar to the rugby team's Six Nations and New Zealand series win..

Do non rugby people realise a Test Series is not a group of friendlies? Do you understand how small our rugby playing population is and the scale of our over achievement? Just a few thoughts.

Sheehan phased out at 21 would have been extremely harsh.