"I started a joke, that started the whole world ......" | Ireland v New Zealand.

Exactly this.

You can be sure there wasn't anything being taken for granted in the Irish dressing room, or in AB one either. The fact they went for two kicks off of penalties inside our 20 shows you the respect they have for us.

Irish fans might have been confident, but that's only because this team gave them plenty of reason to be.

I've been following social media and radio all week and in no way did 80% of Irish fans have fears of the all blacks.

I'd say it's more accurate to say 20% of fans had fears of all blacks and maybe 20% of those had the confidence to say it 🙂

England are in a bad, bad place. But they’ll more than likely be in another SF, which is more than our lot have EVER achieved. We can have all the moral victories in the world but that doesn’t change the facts

That one was almost tougher to take that when they just bombed out in the QF's.

It was there for them to win even though they were a good bit short of their best. Literally held up over the line in the last 5 minutes or so. Very small margins sadly.

No getting away from the fact the draw just never sat well.

If the Scotland game was 2 weeks ago we would have had better recovery time.

And a quarter final against the likes of Scotland, Wales, Fiji or Argentina would be a different proposition entirely.

Having said that I though we needed to switch out a few of the older players going down the stretch.

And we lost by a single score, with Argentina not being the toughest opponents the next day.

I'm not convinced we would have won the RWC anyway, even if we had somehow gotten through tonight. The team looked out on their feet at the end and perhaps a hint that the tournament was starting to slip away from us, win, lose or draw.

All that's missing is a paragraphs about our resilient tech sector

Spoken like a wet wipe

The draw didn't help but we weren't the only ones that had it tough. Look at it from NZ's point of view. They had the hosts in their pool and then the world #1 on a 17 game winning run in the QF. SA have to deal with a France side at home that topped their pool. France have to face a SA team that smashed NZ a few weeks ago and could have topped their pool if they had a reliable kicker. We had the easiest task of the top 4 (on paper) of having to get past the world #4 that lost their previous 2 games against top opposition (France & SA)

The guff out of some of the posters here. Unreal.

This was my nightmare scenario. Lose narrowly, playing pretty well, against a quality team in another quarter final. Apparently being called a ‘**** Richie McCaw’ bothered Sam Cane a bit. He was unreal tonight, and we were slightly below out recent standard because NZ were maniacs in defence. This team are not bottlers. They are great and have given me so much joy the last few years. Andy Farrell has done everything right. Prepared the team incredibly well, and the age profile was bang on for a World Cup. Youth and experience. But the horrible fact is it doesn’t matter. World Cups aren’t everything, but again we couldn’t get past the last 8.

Haunted.

Big moments, big chances and they failed again. Interesting to see how the media fanboys paint this tomorrow. “Gallant Ireland, fall just short” or some such nonsense. Give it a rest, Scotland are allegedly 5th in the world and I doubt they’d win the Leinster Schools Cup.

And yet Ireland have never gone past the quarter final.

Exactly, its a message board. And you'd think people might have something better to do than go trolling on a Saturday night. But clearly you don't. Maybe should try having one too many sometime, might make you tolerable.