Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

Nope. New Zealand made the final, England made the semis and finished 3rd, Argentina made the semis, Fiji made the quarters which was exceeding expectations, Portugal beat Fiji which was a brilliant result for them. You can have a good World Cup without winning it. But I can see how telling yourself 18 other teams are also "bottlers" can make coping easier.

That’s exactly why the old guard need to go. It’s all about WC cycle and building for 2027.

Another quarter final exit most likely

Ireland are already building for the next World Cup btw. Crowley and McCarthy are starters now and Baird looks likely to take over from POM very soon.

There's no point in throwing in a load of younger players at once. It just dramatically destabilizes overall performance. There's also no guarantee that your rebuild will actually be successful. Eddie Jones took the strategy of building for the 2023 WC, but results and performances were so bad that he got sacked a year before the tournament.

There's plenty of time to build a new squad. We'll do it incrementally. And if you can pick up a few trophies along the way all the better.

ireland Have won championships but never have got past a World Cup quarter final.

for me this failure comes back to real player depth not being developed. I understand the IRFU need the money from the 6 nations to pay for the provincial game. So the Irish team always selects its best players and rarely experiments, the problem with that is when World Cup comes around you are up against the southern hemisphere teams who have building for the World Cup for four years.

we lost to New Zealand last year because we did not squad rotate enough prior to the quarter final and for the QF we did not spring the bench quickly enough because Farrell did not trust some of the replacements.

for me if Ireland are going to win a World Cup, we need to build for the World Cup starting now. It’s makes sense to start rotating more and giving more minutes especially to young prospects

I think what some people here seem to forget is that other teams are allowed to play well.

England put in their best performance since the '19 Semi Final and win by a point, at home, with a last minute drop goal and the sky is falling.

Evenly matched New Zealand and Ireland teams trade blow for and one team comes out on top by a single score and Ireland choked

I think the Irish media and fans have to take this one on the chin. We got totally ahead of ourselves. England regularly give us problems even in the last couple of years when we've been at the top of our game. It was 10-9 last season after an hour despite England having been a man down since before half time. It was 16-15 the previous season after 65 minutes despite England being a man down for the entire game. We won both games in the final quarter due to them running out of steam which was in no small part due to being a man down.

At the weekend, they had a vocal crowd, a point to prove and a full team on the field. Any off day for us (and we tend to have them against England) was going to put us in trouble. When 6 or 7 of our guys had their weakest performance of the tournament combined with several key errors/poor execution at big moments, it was unlikely to be our day. The genuinely most surprising thing on the day was the fact that England needed a last minute kick to win it. It's not often you see George Ford 1/4 from the tee including one very straightforward kick he missed in the first half.

England are well able to raise their game and seem to know how to play against us effectively. Some people are seeing this as a huge shock....this is an England team that absolutely destroyed Argentina in the RWC through their physical dominance and then went toe to toe with SA and were minutes from beating them in a RWC semi final. We were rightly favourties but this was always going to happen at some point.