in the victory<\/a> against Italy in his first game since 2 January, a relief for Izuchukwu after fearing he would need surgery earlier in the season which would rule him out of the rest of the campaign.<\/p>\n“Obviously I’ve been injured for the whole season, played like four or five games, haven’t played since early January I think,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I met a surgeon recently and I was supposed to get surgery and stuff, and said I’d give it one more shot and then all of a sudden you’re playing again, so it’s class.<\/p>\n
“It’s unbelievable. I was delighted.”<\/p>\n
Izuchukwu, who has now won five Ireland caps, admitted he was caught by surprise at the magnitude of the Six Nations in the build-up to the Italy game.<\/p>\n
“It’s mental because for me at the France game, such a big stage and I had a taste of it from sitting on the bench as the 24th man, but then I treat every Ireland game just like an Ireland game,” he added.<\/p>\n
“They’re all so special to me, whether it’s Portugal or Fiji or Georgia or whatever, they mean the world to me, but I was blown away by the response from social media, online and my family, it’s such a big deal to them. <\/p>\n
“Six Nations, maybe I didn’t grasp it as much as I should have, so that was a shock, but I kind of came to terms with the last couple of days, got my head around it and then just got stuck in.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cormac Izuchukwu said his Six Nations debut in the 20-13 win over Italy was “unbelievable” amidst an injury-hit…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":428088,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[5903,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-428087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-rugby","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428087\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/428088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}