Joe Schmidt has confirmed that the Leinster and Irish lock Mike McCarthy has been ruled out for the rest of the season after suffering concussion in the defeat to France in Paris last Sunday. Such is the severity of the injury that after seeing a specialist McCarthy has been advised not to play again this season.
“Mike McCarthy has seen a specialist now and he’s going to effectively re-condition himself, freshen himself up to kick-start next season now,” said Schmidt after a 15-man Irish squad conducted an open training session against the Irish Under-20s in his old haunt at Mullingar RFC today.
“That’s the latest word. Maybe that’s not the definitive word. I think just for him it’s an opportunity to freshen himself up a little bit and that will give him a good entry point to next season.”
Schmidt also confirmed that Sean O'Brien (torn hamstring) and Dave Kearney (A/L shoulder injury) have been ruled out for the remainder of the Six Nations. "Sean is likely to miss the rest of the Six Nations, as is Dave Kearney, but we'll continue to monitor those guys and see how they go."
There was, as usual, more concern about Johnny Sexton when he stepped out of the session early on after rolling his ankle, but the Irish coach maintained this was predominantly a precautionary measure and was of no concern ahead of next Saturday’s game against England in Twickenham. Indeed, Schmidt forecast that Sexton would be able to train fully on Monday.
“He just rolled his ankle. He could have trained on. In the end we sent him to the side. He did all the initial stuff just in the unit split but most of what we were going to do was broken play work so we didn’t really need him in there. We had a couple of spare players from the 20s and they had 18 players. We had fifteen. All the other lads are back to play provinces tonight or tomorrow.
“Johnny will be fit to train Monday. The problem with rolling your ankle is if you do train on it- and you can train on it - is that you just get more inflammation whereas the sooner you stop the inflammation, in 48 hours’ time you are up and running so I wouldn’t be concerned at all. When the medics came to me and said ‘do you want him to keep working?’ I said ‘no, keep him out’.”
As for the neck and shoulder problems which Sexton initially sustained against Wales and which he aggravated in the Stade de France, Schmidt said: “Yeah, good. You would have seen him out there. He is fully loosened up. Again, I suppose he put himself in the line of fire because he doesn’t take a step back. He is a competitor. That’s the nature of the beast and there is a lot of that we don’t want to change, to be honest. We have to be as competitive as we can be against big teams and that will be no different in a week’s time when we are getting ready to run on to Twickenham.”
