Shortly before the beginning of the 2010 Six Nations Championship, France and Stade Francais prop David Attoub received a 70 week ban for an eye gouge on Stephen Ferris, during a Heineken Cup match between Ulster and Stade in December 2009.
The pictures of the incident are shocking, with absolutely zero room for mitigation. The judge who handed out the ban also called it "the worst act of contact with the eyes that I have had to deal with: it is a case of deliberate eye gouging."
Stephen Ferris vs Stade Francais
But there was a guy called Julian Dupuy who played for Leicester Tigers who was the scrumhalf for Stade Francais and he gouged me in a game. To be honest, the way it actually happened, I don't think there was as much malice as it probably looked.
Anyway, he got a shorter ban, but there was another guy called David Attoub who was the prop on the pitch also obviously in exactly the same game, it was a very feisty game, it was a very close game. We obviously won the game.
I was playing very well in the game, and about 10 or 15 minutes to go, I was lying under a number of bodies probably trying to catch my breath. And the next thing there was a hand just come over and and he's, you know, sunk his fingers straight into my eyes.
So fortunately there's a guy called Oliver McVeigh who for some odd reason was at the far end of the pitch and he was just snapping away with his camera for anybody who wants to see a gruesome picture. And the other thing was the actual jersey was caught in his finger as well. So his jersey was in my eye, and there was all this going on.
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Ferris went onto describe, lightheartedly, the reaction of some of Dupuy's and Attoub's French teammates when they met once more in the Six Nations, both in 2010 and 2012.
And then of course a couple of weeks later we were in the Six Nations and we had to play against France. Some of the french guys, obviously friends with you know Attoub and Dupuy .... and they obviously didn't like me.
So when I was going up to shake Dimitri Szarzewski's hand at the end of the game, he was going, ha ha ha and called me this, that and the other, and I just laughed it off and away I went and then I think we had to play the fixture again because it was like the frozen ice that year, the pitch was frozen [this was a different year, 2012].
So we had to go back over to Paris and when we were walking off the pitch, obviously he hadn't shaken my hand and we walked off the pitch and there was a tunnel, of course you were handshaking again, and he went like this here [mimics going in for a handshake before taking his hand away] and gave it the old, and he sort of like puffed his chest.
So thankfully I had Paul O'Connell behind me.
"If you saw him now just shake hands, do you think?," asked interviewer Nicola McGeady.
"No, absolutely, no, it's deep rooted, he reminds me of the Prince from Shrek, so that's how I remember him."
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