Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

To lose your first string SH is a very unlikely event

He was literally injured this season and missed a lot of games. He started 1 6 Nations game. It's really not as unlikely as you're making out.

Where are you getting that from?

The poster mentioned the hooker scenario and I pointed out why I'd see that as being different.

There is no connection between hooker and SH

no thats not what im saying, im saying unlikely things happen sometimes and you should prepare as best as possible for that

and ireland generally have 3 hookers in their matchday squad already. cian healy played hooker underage afaik (he played there for ireland schools anyway) - so in the event of an emergency in-game he can cover, that doesnt mean ireland should go with one less hooker now

It is far more common for our locks and backrow players to miss time out injured than our SHs.

nobody is saying the team couldnt function, it just functions infinitely better with specialists playing in the specialist positions

They are all equally rusty and it's the first or second game back for them all. Caolin Blade was judged by many here to be unsuitable from his short cameo against Italy. Joe McC is being raved about for his 30 mins.

If you're in the top 2 scrumhalves in the country, getting the ball away from the base of the scrum is your bread and butter regardless of how far into preseason you are. Both mistakes were poor.

But it isn't like the 3rd choice SH is locked in a box if he doesn't make the squad. They'll have spent the whole summer training and gotten game time a few weeks before they'd be called in to play for Ireland. It also isn't like they're flying to Japan if called up. Familiarity with the team shouldn't be an issue, if it is then that player should be nowhere near international rugby.

Feel this all boils down to what your initial response. You're focusing on upside vs downside, while I'm putting more of a weighting on the likelihood of the downside occurring.

Also, doesn't seem that some are taking into account that we can bring in a 3rd SH later in the tournament which negates any concerns regarding the knockout period. Other teams are 100% going to leverage this (I'm looking at you Rassie) so we should to so we maximise the benefits.

My perception of this kind of 'gamble' has probably been impacted by the more and more I get into US sports I see how they do a great job of leaning on analytics and not being swayed by the less likely events occurring and how they manipulate their roster based on the rules.

No one is disagreeing with that but that isn't all you're saying.

The issue is when you take your next step and want to sacrifice bringing another player that could definitely be valuable for a specialist who has very little value unless an extremely unlikely event occurs.

It's a fair point, but our back-row at least have shown themselves to be incredibly robust over the last while.

Of our 4 first choice back-row players in the 23, they missed a total of 1 game vs Tier 1 opposition in the last 2 seasons thru injury. (1 out of 76 samples)

JGP alone missed 4. (4 out of 19 samples)

So maybe they will lean on analytics. And go with Casey.

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EDIT: The above was prior to the warm-up games, so including the England game, with Conan injured, that changes to 2 out of 80 samples for the back-row, and 4 out of 20 samples for JGP.

Which, very neatly, means JGP has been 8 times more likely to miss a game thru injury in the last 2 seasons than the 4 back-row players.

i wonder was crowley at fault for the pass that was going to him in the 22, it looked like a perfect pass for him to run onto. obviously its usually the 10 making the calls but it could have happened

as stated already by myself and others, it makes very little sense to leave someone out who is one injury from the squad for someone who is 2/3 injuries away from being involved - neither are likely to play in an important game anyway but a 9 is more likely to find themselves involved at short notice

I don't think you can afford to bring a player to the world cup who isn't 100% fit. If he's not going to be fit for 6-8 weeks you bring someone else in and get them up to speed. If one of the guys in the squad then gets injured, the player left behind gets his call up.

If your idea of 'analytics' is selecting 5 players and their availability during a small subset of two seasons you might need to revisit your understanding.