Touch of class at heartbreak hotel

When the chips were down in Paris, England’s dinner-suited players found themselves cast in the role of hapless bystanders among the pilgrims in downtown Rome, near the Vatican.

They could only stand and stare as their fate rested ultimately on the video referee.

Brian O’Driscoll would have known exactly how they felt because seven years earlier he had endured the same excruciating scenario in the same city with the same result.