#cian-healy

#cian-healy

I'm really excited to be joining Sale. My body feels good and I'm still performing at a high level. I feel like I can compete with the best of them, and then some, and I think if I retired now, I'd probably regret it when I was older.

Brendan Griffin's whistle sounds and it's all over for another year in Division 2 as the Royals reign supreme in Croke Park! A massive second-half improvement from Robbie Brennan's men, as Cork faded midway through that period of the game.

Dublin's victory over Carlow was marked by a remarkable performance, with twelve different scorers contributing to a 14-point win, securing their promotion to Division 1A.

In likes of Tommy O'Brien, Robert Baloucoune and Jamie Osborne, Andy Farrell has a fresh crop of winners ahead of Rugby World Cup. As the man with the deaf dog says 'it can be hard to call it'. That has been the case in the majority of this year's Six Nations but when Ireland play Scotland we now expect Ireland to win.

Henry Pollock has been such a prominent figure in the recent rugby landscape that we had to double check that Saturday will be the first time he has started a game for England. Such has been the meteoric rise of the effervescent 21-year-old, it's easy to forget that up to now, each of his seven Test caps has come from the bench. That will all change against Ireland at Twickenham this weekend.

Unless you are an avid Super Rugby watcher, it's unlikely that the name Jamison Gibson-Park would have meant much when he first rocked up to Leinster in late 2016. Sure, he was well known in Kiwi circles, but Gibson-Park didn't arrive in Ireland to much fanfare.

Tony Ward, voted the first European Player of the Year two months earlier, was dropped. He had won the award largely for his dazzling form in that season's Five Nations Championship. Then, ahead of the First Test on Ireland's tour of Australia, he was canned. It made the six o'clock news. Ward was a gifted footballer. He would go on to play in the League of Ireland for Limerick United FC, starring for them against Southampton in the Uefa Cup.

Cian and Sam Prendergast wished each other luck at the start of the week, but that will be the extent of the communication between the brothers before tomorrow's sold-out interpro derby at the redeveloped Dexcom Stadium.

Andy Farrell has been left reeling by another blow, with news that Hugo Keenan is out of Ireland's opening Six Nations game against France on Thursday week after suffering a fractured thumb in training yesterday.