Italy game of little value to Ireland or England

It was an unfortunate sequence of events that reduced the Ireland versus Italy game to a foregone conclusion on Sunday at the Aviva Stadium.

Calls for a change in the laws are justified because nobody should lose two players for one sending-off incident.

Especially when Gianmarco Lucchesi, Italy's starting hooker, was genuinely injured.

However, don’t tell me that Hame Faiva didn’t deserve the red card for his high hit on Dan Sheehan.

You can get frustrated with the laws and how one moment in a tackle potentially destroyed the game, but don’t say that Faiva didn’t intentionally opt for a higher tackle focus.

Sheehan stands at around 6' 3" and was high enough going into the tackle for Faiva make contact with at least 4 feet of him legally.

You also can’t say convincingly that Sheehan dipped into that contact.

He is well within his rights to run at that height into the tackle area without getting a shoulder to the chin or neck area. It was a red card and referee Nika Amashukeli had a very consistent game.

What played out afterwards was of little benefit to anybody.

Ireland would have preferred to play against Italy’s 14 players instead of having them reduced to 13.

I’d say if given the choice, Ireland would have reinstated the Italian team to 15 players so they could get a real test under their belts before taking England on in Twickenham in two weeks.

Uncontested scrums didn’t benefit the Irish front row.

Finlay Bealham and David Kilcoyne came on for Ireland but didn’t get to put their hand up in the most important aspect of their game.

Props need to scrummage and need to get live scrums at international level. Training reps and club games won’t prepare them for the cauldron of international scrummaging.

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