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11th February 2016
03:57pm GMT

"What does it all mean?" "Simon Zebo must be fit, so" "There's no bloody coffee left!"Then, five minutes before Joe Schmidt arrived, we got the teams. "Holy shit, there's Dave Kearney on the wing.... wait, what? There's Fergus!" Frantic rewrites and rejigged headlines. Many of us were still clacking away when Joe took his seat. Breathless stuff that even took the IRFU Twitter account on the hop. https://twitter.com/IrishRugby/status/697773590863863808 We feel your pain.
I gave Mike McCarthy the chance to trot out the statistic during our mixed zone chat. In retrospect, I was being a complete smartarse.
SportsJOE: "So Mike, how many times have Ireland beaten France in Paris in the Six Nations?" McCarthy: "One, I think. And one draw." SportsJOE: "Two wins and a draw." McCarthy: "Yeah, two wins... thanks."If looks could kill.
"Those guys [Cian and Mike] haven't played a lot of rugby and it's more important for them to get a good 60 minutes against Zebre. "I don't think Joe was ever really thinking about calling them up, to be honest. It was probably somebody in the press saying it and it snowballed."
"Johnny's fully fit and we'll let Paddy go back and play for Ulster if there's time enough for them to adjust their group. And probably that keeps him ticking over. "He is going really well with us, but when we've got so many variables in play at the moment with the backline and Rob Kearney coming back. "But Ian Madigan just giving us that flexibility on the bench is probably just allowing him to stay ahead of Paddy there."We may yet see young Master Jackson, against Italy. Poor scamp.
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