Nearly 12 years on from the spear tackle which ended Brian O'Driscoll's 2005 Lions tour, Keven Mealamu, one of the All Black players involved, has spoken about the incident.
In an interview with NewsRoom.co.nz, Mealamu said he met O'Driscoll while sitting alone having breakfast at a Hong Kong hotel earlier this year.
We didn’t talk about what happened.
But we did get to catch up. It’s the first time we’ve had a proper conversation since the event.
Less than a minute into the first test between the Lions and All Blacks, O'Driscoll lay on the Christchurch turf, writhing in pain. He had just been dumped on his shoulder by a combination of Mealamu and All Blacks captain Tana Umaga.
Mealamu says he and Umaga did not set out to intentionally injure the Irish centre.
It’s one of the reasons I didn’t go back to see how he was because it happened so quickly and I had moved on.
I just thought it was a typical rugby movement till I realised Tana was on the side and we had tipped him up and he had landed on his shoulder.
There has long been a sense that the All Blacks felt like they were ulitmately the victims of what happened to O'Driscoll, that the injury overshadowed their performance in the three-test series.
Mealamu says that he still feels 'stink' about how the tackle took the focus away from his team.
It’s not something you ever want to do - take the focus away from the team and the performance. It’s something I still feel stink about.
Picture credit: Sportsfile
