“It’s an incident and when you slow it down, it can look bad.”
One of the most controversial incidents of the recent Six Nations Championship was the ACL injury suffered by France’s Antoine Dupont, following a ruck clear out from Ireland’s Andrew Porter and Tadhg Beirne.
France’s head coach, Fabien Galthié, was incensed, but the citing commissioner agreed with referee Angus Gardner, who did not even award a penalty, that there was no malice involved and the ‘rugby incident’ was not worthy of any punishment.
However, the fallout from the incident was ugly, with Andrew Porter’s wife revealing that she had been sent abusive messages, while former Munster and Ireland winger Andrew Conway said that players had received ‘threatening’ messages.
Ahead of Munster’s Champions Cup clash with La Rochelle on Saturday, Beirne discussed how he tried to offer his apologies to Dupont after the loss, and also touched on the abuse he received.
“Yeah, I reached out to him. I messaged him on Instagram. I tried looking for him after the game, as well, but didn’t get to him.
“He must have been with the medical teams, and that. He has a million followers on Instagram, I’m pretty sure, so he’s not going to see a message from me.
“It was all I could do, at the time. I sent my regards through Gregory Alldritt, as well.
“It’s an incident,t and when you slow it down, it can look bad. But it’s an incident that wasn’t intentional.
“I never intended to injure him. The last thing I want to do is injure the best player in the world.
“You don’t go out there to hurt anyone. It was just unfortunate, the way it happened. I’m sorry for the fact that it happened to him. You don’t like to see it happen to any player.
“The backlash that myself, Andrew Porter and our families got, afterwards, was probably enough punishment, on its own, to be honest with you.”
