Ireland centre Robbie Henshaw appears set to miss the team’s Rugby World Cup opening game against Scotland on Sunday with a hamstring injury.
The Irish camp are not giving up hope on Henshaw recovering, but they have finally admitted that he is “unlikely to feature” against the Scots. Ireland’s scrum coach Greg Feek confirmed the news to the media.
“Robbie’s looking very, very unlikely for this weekend obviously. But we’ve just got back from training and still sorting things out, but I think it’s reasonably positive in terms of what we saw,” he said.
However, despite seeming very unlikely to play this weekend Feek is confident that Henshaw will return to action soon.
“Some of these guys, day by day, week by week, they can improve dramatically as opposed to the average human. So we’ll just take it like that at the moment. It’s looking positive, so from here on in we’ll just see how it goes in the next few days and then maybe reassess in the not too distant future. He’s a good man, great to have around, his work ethic is incredible and you know he’s doing the work. To be at this stage now there’s probably a sense of relief,” he added.
The IRFU have confirmed that Henshaw will remain in Japan with the 31-man squad, despite reports claiming that Will Addison is set to be called up by head coach Joe Schmidt, but they have decided not to release the full details of Henshaw’s injury yet which is a worrying sign.
In more positive news for Irish fans Feek also confirmed that fly-half Joey Carbery has been training fully as he continues to recover from an injury he picked up against Italy in a World Cup warm-up game.
“Joey was running around today and trained, he looked pretty good. So we’re just all really happy for him more than anything,” he finished.
Ireland will hope that Henshaw will recover in time to face Japan in their second game of the pool stages, however, all focus will be on kicking their campaign off with a perfect start against the Scots on Sunday.
