Simon Easterby has expressed his disappointment with his French counterpart Fabien Galthie for his comments following last week’s Guinness Six Nations meeting between the sides in Dublin.
France were 42-27 winners to end Ireland’s Grand Slam hopes, but the days since the game have been dominated by the fallout from Antoine Dupont’s ACL injury.
The French captain is set for a lengthy spell on the sidelines after suffering the injury in the first half in Dublin last week, with Galthie laying the blame at the door of Ireland forwards Tadhg Beirne and Andrew Porter.
In his post-match press conference in Dublin, the France coach claimed the pair's actions were "reprehensible", and said he would be reporting them - and Calvin Nash - to the citing commissioner. Nash had been sin-binned for a separate incident later in the game.
While Les Bleus called for the Irish players to be sanctioned after the game, they were ultimately vindicated when the citing commissioner took no further action.
Speaking on Tuesday, Porter said his conscious was clear, and Easterby followed that up by expressing his disappointment at how the citing process was played out in public.
"Without getting myself into trouble here, I just think it's the game, unfortunately," the Ireland interim coach said of the incident.
"These things happen. No player goes out to intentionally injure another player. For the majority of people, looking at it afterwards, everyone felt like it was a rugby incident, which was really unfortunate."
Easterby became more animated when describing how Galthie’s comments led to a social media pile-on.
He said: "No player goes out to injure another player. It just doesn't happen.
"Whatever the insinuations were from different people, post-game, it's disappointing because the unfortunate thing is that people who don't really understand the game pick up on it, and it creates a bit of a sh**storm where people are getting abuse.
"It's just unnecessary, and it's not acceptable, but it happens. Those things could have been avoided had maybe other things been said post-game by certain individuals.
"The French camp have obviously come out pretty strongly post-game about the incident and it could have been handled in a better way.
"And I think on the back of that, it’s created some unnecessary ill-feeling and it’s affected other people in the wider group and that’s disappointing.
"I’m just saying that it’s unnecessary, the coverage on social media, that’s all I am saying. I don’t read it, I don’t necessarily take a lot of notice of it but when it’s directed at certain individuals and certain individuals’ wider family group, then it becomes an issue."
With Galthie’s post-match comments on Saturday coming after Easterby had held his press conference, the Irish coach wasn’t in a position to respond until naming his team to face Italy, which contains six changes, this afternoon.
And the public nature of the calls for a citing clearly irked him.
He added: "I think it could have been handled in a way that... we talk as coaches all the time and we chat post-game. I think it could have been a different discussion, a different platform to air those frustrations that maybe France had.
"We and World Rugby and the Six Nations believe that there was no case to answer and certainly it didn't help, it almost sort of fanned the flames of what was a really unfortunate incident.
"But it was a rugby incident and that's the bottom line. Unfortunately, these things happen."
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