Ireland v The Afterpartyers Super Saturday Matchthread

It's called standards. Every champion team in history has had them. We were very poor today. Don't let the BP win paper over the obvious cracks.

Of course I don't actively want Ireland to fail. Bizarre that you'd draw that conclusion from me simply calling our a poor performance.

Watching Ireland doesn't make me angry or unhappy. But when we play crap it does annoy me a bit yes. Are you even a sports fan if your team playing crap doesn't annoy you?

You could have played with Tony Ward at 10 today and still won,

What was the point of playing Sexton,

Stuart Hogg getting salty

https://twitter.com/patmccarry/status/1505270456441520129?t=LRrk-v08kpuHHx3pKWczcg&s=19

France have to beat England, a draw with a bonus point would only leave them level with us, and we have the better score difference.

Psychic Sally over here. How on earth did you predict that one?

Is there any point in talking about what that performance would or wouldn’t do against SA or NZ? We weren’t playing SA or NZ. We’d almost certainly have upped our game against them. And it’s also more than worth noting that Scotland spoil. It’s what they do. Make a mess of everything and hope for the best. We’re several months behind France in our development to the RWC and we have a small fraction of their resources. Yet we were very close to turning them over in Paris in what was their best performance of the tournament.

The other teams were all poor this year. And that suited France. They bottled it last week against a Welsh side that couldn’t take advantage. Wales do that and we win the tournament.

We haven’t played to our potential since Paris really. Yet we have won all of those games comfortably. There’s plenty of positives there.

Our discipline hasn’t really been an issue. Italy conceded the least number of penalties (46), then France (47) and then Ireland (50). Beating in mind last week we were penalised a number of time when we shouldn’t have been and had 4 really stupid penalties that we shouldn’t really have conceded. It was an outlier from that perspective and that’s the difference between us being 3rd and either 1st or 2nd in terms of discipline.

Depth in a few positions is the big concern though all right. The problem is that there isn’t the depth there. Farrell can’t magic it out of nowhere. It’s probably a lot to ask that we have 25 or so top quality test players given our resources.

We've won our last 3 because we've played against 3 very poor teams (one of which had 13 men, one had 14). We've been poor in every single one, it's just none of them have been good enough to punish us. If you think we're playing very well, I don't know what planet you're living on. If we carry this form into the summer, it will be a slaughter like the 2012 tour. I don't buy the argument that we're only making errors because of this new style we're bedding in. We didn't make anywhere near as many errors against NZ, Japan and Wales.

I just don't think it's as rosy in the garden as everyone's making out. Had Ewels not had a brain explosion after 80 seconds in Twickenham, it would be 3 wins from 5 again, for the third year in a row. Losing Porter and Kelleher has decimated our scrum, which has been utterly taken apart the last two games, which should be a massive concern (but I suppose Scotland we're just cheating, right). The age profile of the team going into a world cup year is not ideal, the majority of the backs being 30+, similar to 2019. Both our 9s are 30+, Sexton turns 37 in the summer, Aki is turning 32, Conway turns 31, Lowe turns 30. We missed a huge chance to give Balouocune a run yesterday, Hansen hasn't been convincing over the last couple of games and RB definitely has a far higher ceiling. I think Doris is massively overrated, and I won't buy into his hype until he stops making so many stupid errors. Carty was the form out half coming into the tournament and should have seen more than 6 minutes, yet we stick with a guy who hasn't shown any form in 3 years.

I think we're starting to see teams figure us out a bit. Our play is heavily reliant and fast ruck ball, so if you heavily attack our breakdown you can really stifle our game, and I've no doubt that's what teams will start to do. Similar to how teams figured out if you hit us with fast linespeed in 2019, we'd crumble. And we're still highly susceptible to being physically bullied, as we saw v England and France.

That's not to say there hasn't been positives. Keenan established himself as one of the top fullbacks in the world (and in Lowry we have 2 very good options there). VDF established himself as one of the top 7s. We're trying to play a great brand of rugby. Ringrose is back to form (even though I think a fully fit Henshaw is a better 13).

I just don't think we're near as good as we think we are, and could be in for a very rude awakening in the summer.

The problem is, Farrell can't magic players out of thin air. He can only work with the players he has.

If players aren't putting their hands up with performances for their provinces, there's fcuk all Farrell can do