THE LAST time we saw Joe McCarthy in an Ireland jersey, he was the one walking around in the background of the nightmarish drama that was the World Cup quarter-final defeat by New Zealand in Paris.
Front of stage, of course, was Johnny Sexton. The fly-half went out on his shield that night. The cameras turned instinctively to the older stagers in Andy Farrell’s team, men who will not be seen in that arena again. As a kid of 22, McCarthy had a bit-part in the melancholy.
“The dressing room was awful,” says the Leinster and Ireland lock. “It feels like a bit of a nightmare when you get back in the dressing room and you can’t actually believe that’s just happened. You have so much belief in the team to go the whole way and you didn’t envision it going any other way so, yeah, it was tough.
“There was silence for a few minutesespecially bad for some of the lads, especially Johnny. You were meant to send him off on a high, end his career the way he would have wanted to, and we fell short.”
