Player safety being compromised

There’s a moment in the second episode of the superb American football documentary Last Chance U when Brittany Wagner, an athletic academic advisor — yep, it’s a thing — with East Mississippi Community College, exhales dramatically during a tight game with rival college Co-Lin and reckons that she may have just stopped breathing for a full minute.

Last Saturday in the Aviva Stadium felt like that. Not just for 60 seconds, but for 80 minutes and the rest. When it was done and the interviews dusted yours truly hailed a cab, made for home and climbed into bed for a deep nine-hour stretch.

If Ireland-New Zealand could do that to an onlooker, what must it have felt like for the players?