In the first of his regular interviews with the twice-weekly French magazine Rugby Hebdo, an offshoot of L'Équipe, Brian O'Driscoll revealed he "couldn't see much" when attending a cousin's wedding last Saturday; his right eye was closed.
"But I feel better than I did on Friday. I didn't know what to expect. The doctor quickly realised there was something broken and while I'm disappointed to be out for three to four weeks, I'm relieved to miss only the first game of the World Cup.
"I'm not going to make a big fuss about it. I don't feel bitter against the guy who did it. It's something that should not happen but sometimes it happens in rugby. It was just bad luck that it was me. The thing is I wouldn't have had any complaints if I had been really involved in a fight but I was trying to separate two players. It's not right to punch someone like that."
Asked if it was worth the risk to undertake the match, the Ireland captain said, "There's always a risk and we couldn't really expect what was going to happen. We were expecting a tough match but a tough match is to be hard in the tackle and hard in the rucks, it's not to give sneaky punches. Maybe it was a tactic by the Bayonne players to make us lose it."
Ironically, O'Driscoll famously flirted with joining Bayonne's bitter rivals Biarritz, and any lingering regrets he didn't would surely have been dispelled by the events of last Thursday.
Nonetheless, when it was to put to him it was not entirely a case of Irish lambs confronted by Bayonne bulls and that the home fullback Daniel Larrechea had been sidelined for four weeks by a late tackle, O'Driscoll conceded, "I'm not going to say we were all innocent and they were all guilty. We lost our concentration from time to time and two of my team-mates received yellow cards and the referee was generally right, but we reacted to what was going on."
Asked if the match might have been a foretaste of what to expect when France host Ireland in the World Cup in Stade de France on September 21st, O'Driscoll laughed and said, "I'll be concentrating on my game that day, but I haven't got any concerns. There will be a lot of cameras around the pitch."
