Ulster Team Talk Thread IV... Go On My Henderson...

You really shouldn’t be surprised, he’s ulsters starting 9, this constantly happens on boards someone new comes along or a team sign a player and people move other players along particularly to France for a big pay day but it very rarely happens.

My biggest gripe is Allison, Rea, McCann all excelled at u20s and few others in the past. If they had been elsewhere would they be further along in development?

Still put this down to lack of said depth and a higher baseline across the board for the squad. Ulster traditionally have always needed as strong as possible teams fielded leaving little room for development.

That has now changed but still behind the other provinces and I look at Munsters emerging talent and think they’ve leap frogged us again. With a similar age profile shadowing us.

Internationals come when squads raise their game and continue to peak!

Gavin Coombes was behind Marcus Rea at u20 level, Paul Boyle was in the same year and Caelan Doris was a year younger if memory serves, although Doris was always a standout talent so comparing them might be unfair.

We've actually had a few backrowers in the u20 squads and none of them really fired a shot to suggest that they were pro players and our second rows have been depressingly poor both in terms of age-grade representation and academy development. So yea, it's hard to say we can trust our coaches yet to build a pack from the academy even if there's finally some decent talent coming through.

Wasn't Marcus Rea Ireland U19 captain?

His progress has been painfully slow, but the signs now are promising.

It does frustrate me a bit when I see one or two bit part back rows getting the nod over the likes of Marcus Rea and David McCann. Maybe on that particular day they are the better choice, but thinking ahead I'd rather see these young lads getting a shot. More often than not they perform pretty well.

Can anyone really point to Marcus Rea playing badly for Ulster? Did he not get man of the match in his debut against Leinster 2 or 3 years ago?

The progress of Marcus rea and Azur Allison hasn’t been helped by all the injury issues they have had

Not long now -:I expect us to go fully locked and loaded

We were also going to go as string as possible - we dropped two games and have to get in the groove for Europe.

Expect us to be a bit rusty.

How are Tom Stewart and Lewis Finlay progressing? I thought they looked good for Ireland U20s a few years back.

Maybe it's that they don't want two inexperienced scrumhalves coming through at the same time, but I would have thought Finlay was quite capable of passing Shanahan by now.

He is in the Academy, I suppose, but I completely agree.

I just remember being pretty impressed with him over the U20 6N - fast delivery, heads-up gameplay, good trail lines - to the point where I'd expected him to be breaking through by now.

Yeah I'm surprised Finlay hasn't had a shot yet. I think he played in one of the Saracens matches in August or whenever it was.

To be fair Shanahan isn't getting much of a look in these days either.

Shanahan is out of contract end of season I think.

Hopefully Finlay gets a chance, be good to have some competition going forward with Doak.

Conor McKee in the academy also, but from what little I've seen Finlay looked sharper.

That's really tough to take tbh, a one man advantage for basically the whole game and Munster weren't showing much in attack, only to be done in by a missed tackle on Jack O'Donoghue of all players.

Bierne is a turnover machine but we made it easy for him, too slow to secure our own ball far too often.

Burns kicking in itself was fine, and pinning them back in those conditions isn't a bad plan if you can force a mistake from them, but we couldn't capitalise at all. My problem was that it was always his first choice option whenever they had Scannell and Farrell in centre, who aren't exactly defensive specialists, Zebo sent off, and Sean French defending the wide channels, and he looked a little headless out there on his first start. McIlroy, Lowry and Hume are good players to take advantage of that, but on out runners then kicking was drilled into us.

We lacked intensity and urgency the whole game, and got complacent after the red card imo. Our bench was a bit of a problem as well, couldn't impact the game or bring any stability but there's not much we can do about poor depth with so many people missing I suppose.

Again, really hard loss to take but roll on Northampton.

I just had a feeling we'd lose that from about the 25 or 30 minute mark.

We're still too inconsistent.

We really missed McCloskey. Any idea when he is back?