Stephen Ferris spoke to Balls.ie on our daily sports podcast The Racket ahead of the kick-off of the Six Nations this weekend.
You can listen to the entire interview below.
During the course of the interview, Ferris gave much more detail on his least favourite referee in the game: Wayne Barnes.
The Genia-vanquishing former back-rower was sin-binned four times in his career, and Ferris revealed the common theme to all four incidents:
It's funny, I was yellow-carded four times in my career, and all four times it was by Wayne Barnes, so that tells you some story.
Ferris also spoke about one incident during the Grand Slam decided against Wales in 2009 which, although it didn't involve a yellow card, showcased Barnes' amazing lack of sympathy for him.
Ferris described the Grand Slam as the apogee of his career, but expressed disappointment at having to go off injured during the game. Here is the tale behind the injury. Any queasy/Barnes-sympathising readers are best to look away now:
I went to dive on the ball, and quickly learned my lesson as Martyn Williams went to hack it away with his foot.
He hit the ball and my finger, and when my finger went I knew straight away something wasn't right. I looked down - and I'll not go into the gory detail - but there were bits of bones sticking out, it was all over the shop.
I ran up to Wayne Barnes and I showed him my hand, and he just said 'play on'.
I said 'hold on a second mate, my finger's hanging off, I need to get this seen to. I played on for what felt like two hours, but was really about twenty seconds, making tackles with my finger hanging off.
Eventually, Paul O'Connell went up to Wayne Barnes and said 'Ref, he's got a compound fracture of his finger, he has to go off'. I started to laugh a bit, Barnes looked over and said 'ok, off you go' and I went off.
So I was playing a game of rugby with my finger more or less hanging off and Wayne Barnes said to play on.
I'm not sure it was funny at the time, but I can look back now and think it was pretty funny.
It is worth listening to the interview purely for Ferris' imitation of O'Connell's accent.
See Also: Joe Schmidt Misses The Perfect Opportunity With Ireland Team Vs Wales
