No EOS...so who else?

Louie Scrawny Warehouse wrote:

Im not, what he did at Leinster doesnt inspire confidence, and BOD said in his book that the players werent fond of him.


Also he made the call to drop the in form Jennings for Ciaran Potts and Gleeson (who'd played 2 games) for the HC QF against Leicester.

He is also the only Irish coach to win anything of value, but sure what does that prove..

I would have agreed with that until I started reading about the Gaffers lack of feed back to players and unhappy players. He took munster so far, I think Jim Williams had a bigger impact in making munster into a more professional team.

Whether you like Kidney or not, I would be very confident he would take on developing players for the big competitions and inject some spark into our team.

Then there is always Niallo..

LuckyLloyd wrote:

Anyone strongly involved on the coaching staff in Munster over the past seven years deserves consideration at the very least. They have won. They have achieved. If they don't stand up through an interview, review and assessment process then fair enough.

But they have surely earned "first dibs" if Eddie was to go so to speak. That's all I'm saying.

I don't believe that should necessarily be the case. It could be a bad idea installing another coach who will bring baggage to the job - be it positive or negative.
Kidney is very well known by both Munster and Leinster players and may just keep doing the same things. I think the International team should be run very differently to a provincial one and open the players up to new ideas and ways of playing than they get at the provinces.

That way they get the best of both worlds with two very different coaching visions being given to them.

il gatto wrote:

If Kidney couldn't get them to fire this year, maybe it's not Eddie's fault.

Yeah it's definitely the case that it's not EOS's fault when top professional players can't perform to a standard to comfortably see off Namibia and Georgia.

It's also important to realise that when we look back at the selection decisions he made, and judge them now that we try and ignore some of the hindsight that we have now. For example he dropped Hickie for Trimble after two very sub par performances from Hickie. Trimble did no better (as we know now), but at the time I was happy enough to see Hickie gone.

However there is one decision he made which I think was deeply flawed, and obviously so even without hindsight.

When we didn't perform against Namibia he picked the same (bar 1 injury) team to play Georgia. That meant that in a best case scenario (assuming we played really well and were comfortably ahead at half time) he could rest 3 or 4 players from about 50 minutes.

He therefore ensured from that point that we were going to go into the crunch games with France and Argintina with 10/11/12 players who had played 2 full games in the previous 2 weeks. Considering that resting players during France and Argintina was highly unlikely he ensured then that if we made a quarter final the vast bulk of our front line team would have played 4 full matches in 4 weeks previously.

As far as I'm concerned EOS ensured with that selection that IReland's chances of making a semi final were close to nil - even if the players had started to perform to their potential.

4 matches in a month is hardly beyond our top professionals, especially when two of them are against the likes of Namibia and Georgia. These players play that often for their clubs and nobody seems to make an issue of it. We can all complain about the lack of rotation (as I've done elsewhere) but when it comes down to it, no amount of bad coaching should result in a team like Ireland coming within a whisker of losing to Georgia.
EOS may have his shortcomings but players of that quality should be able to beat minnows with minimal effort reardless of bad coaching for a few weeks in the lead up to the WC. Wales have a sh1te manager and they at least showed up at the WC. The Irish team hadn't the stomach for it and a manager should never have to go through the motions of getting a team fired up for a WC. The players need to take a look at themselves.

nedward wrote:

Bring back Gatty! .

Now you’re talking, I firmly believe EOS reaped what was started by Gatland snd lived of the momentum the players brought with them from the provinces.

The game plan was probably to rotate players for the Georgia game, but due to the woeful performance against Namibia that didn't happen.

We've now faced the reality of basically playing our first XV for every game.