Joe Schmidt: 'To go from 40 down to 31 was really difficult'

Joe Schmidt described the difficulty of narrowing his Ireland 2019 World Cup squad down from 45 over the course of the summer before making his final cut to bring the number to 31 on Monday.

The Ireland head coach had called his previous experience of telling those players who would not be involved in 2015 that it was a “horrible couple of days” and “probably the worst couple of days I’ve had in coaching, this time four years ago”.