NO EXCUSES FROM CASEY

Ambitious Munster scrumhalf vows to 'be better' if Japan opportunity comes

- BY GARRY DOYLE

CRAIG Casey can't let it go. Chicago, the briefest of cameos, the smallest of errors — and yet it has eaten away at him for days.

“I've watched it 25 times,” he admits. “I still don't know what I was thinking at the time.”

He's talking about Cam Roigard’s try, the score which turned a defeat into a nightmare for Ireland in Soldier Field.

A flicker of misjudgment, a lapse of concentration, the kind of thing that happens to every player.

But Casey isn't every player. His standards are suffocatingly high, his self-appraisal unforgiving.

“It’s completely on me,” he says. “You have to take it on the chin and be better. It's never nice when a scrumhalf scores against you either.”

That line - be better — is the essence of Casey. It's why he'll spend hours reliving a mistake others would bury. Why he'll walk into a team meeting and tell his teammates, unprompted, exactly where he went wrong.

“It's been eating at me,” he says. “But you probably can't recover from it if youre not honest with yourself - or with each other.