Wing Jacob Stockdale has opened up about the abuse he received on social media after Ireland’s World Cup quarter-final loss against the All Blacks last year.

New Zealand thrashed Ireland 46-14 in a highly anticipated quarter-final matchup, a result which continued the trend of Ireland never progressing past the last eight.

Stockdale told the Irish Times that after the loss, fans came at him on Twitter and one of the messages included a death threat.

‘You get certain messages, private messages and stuff that are incredibly hurtful or aggressive,’ the 24-year-old said.

‘After the New Zealand quarter-final I got messages from people telling me to kill myself and things like that, which is obviously awful.

‘For me, whenever I was reading those messages, they didn’t annoy me as much because I knew these people were trolls and they were just trying to get a reaction out of me. I’m sure, I’d hope they didn’t actually mean what they were saying.

‘Funny enough, the ones that really annoyed me were the ones where people were saying that I wasn’t any good at rugby.

‘They were frustrating because I felt they didn’t know as much about rugby as I did. It felt that they really meant it [the criticism] and those would be the ones that would annoy me more than the people messaging me and telling me to top myself.’

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