O'Sullivan stands firm on O'Gara claim

The cloud that hung over the Murrayfield air in the light of Eddie O'Sullivan's highly sensitive and serious post-match claim that a Scottish played deliberately tried to choke Ronan O'Gara lingered on yesterday and looks likely to do so for a long time.

The match commissioner, Brian Fowler of Wales, has 50 hours from Saturday's kick-off time (ie, to 3.30pm today) to decide whether to cite any players for foul play, and O'Sullivan did bring his attention to that incident and asked him to look at it. But given both RTÉ and BBC spent hours examining their video footage and found no conclusive proof of anything untoward, as O'Sullivan also conceded post-match, it is not expected Fowler will cite any player.

O'Sullivan stood his ground yesterday in maintaining "something did happen", adding: "If nothing happened, then maybe the person involved in the incident would come forward and explain what happened. Then we'd all be the wiser. Is that a fair comment? Rather than me making accusations that everyone knows I can't substantiate in proof. But we all know that something happened. And we all know what happened.

"The ideal scenario would be that the person involved in the incident would come forward and explain the incident. And maybe we're all wrong here. Maybe it was a complete and utter accident or he had nothing to do with anything. That would be the simple solution, wouldn't it?"

O'Sullivan confirmed the accusation was prompted by what other Irish players, as distinct from O'Gara himself, witnessed.

"Ronan has the least amount of information. He went out like a light. If you look at the video, he was kicking out actually. And he was gone blue. John Hayes spotted it immediately and put him into the recovery position. So Ronan just drifted off, like. Gone.

"It's a pity it's overshadowing the game. I thought it was a good, tough encounter. At times a bit fraught, but you'd expect that. This incident has no reflection on the game, nothing to do with the game. It happened in the last minute and it's a pity we're all talking about it. But it was a nasty enough incident whether you like it or not."

Despite the finger of suspicion pointing at one of their players, there was no further reaction from the Scottish camp yesterday in addition to their own post-match stance: "We refute absolutely any allegation of foul play at the end of the game."

If they are so sure of this, argued some of the Scottish media, then arguably they should demand an apology.