Leinster Team Talk Thread (Love you Furlong time)

Your McCann example just doesn't hold water to be honest - The "backrow contracts aren't all tied up" forever.

If in a few years time McCann is tearing up trees and is a regular starter for Ireland usurping JVDF from the team then he gets his contract when it expires , just as Joe McCarthy, based on current form will probably take Hendersons slot when his contract expires.

The opportunity is to help share the demographics better with the other provinces.

Lets say that Leinster produce a dozen players that are at a level worthy of an academy contract each year , but they only have 6/7 slots available and will choose those slots based on their future positional needs - I'd imagine they will be overloading on scrum-halves in the coming years to try to unearth the long term replacements for JGP and McGrath for example.

If there was money available to help the other provinces make their offers more appealing as I previously suggested - College scholarship budgets , accommodation costs covered etc. it might make a move to another city more appealing to those players.

The idea of using financial coercion to get players to move to another province is just terrible from a man management perspective and also probably a breach of employment law.

The approach needs to be carrot , not stick.

The suggestion was to say to a player - "Take a pay cut and stay here or keep your current salary and move there"

That would absolutely be a potential case for constructive dismissal etc.

Obviously saying "here's a pay increase to take another role" is no issue , but that wasn't the original suggestion.

This is the key question.

We absolutely do not have the money to have 4 separate teams operating at a level that has them competing at the business end of both the URC and CC in most season. We just don't , we're not as bad as the Welsh but we simply don't have that kind of revenue.

We might have the revenue to have two teams at that level and to be fair Munster were almost there , barring their horrendous squad injury profile over the last two seasons.

So do we want 4 "balanced" budgets and squads , none of whom are quite good enough to be getting to Semi final/Final stages in the URC and CC every year or do we want to have at least one , maybe two that are??

And if we decide on the latter model as it would seem we have , does it not make sense for that team to be based in the largest population centre to maximise the opportunity?

That's not saying that we can't be doing more to ensure we are developing every single possible Pro-player coming out of the clubs and schools which means we need to work make it more attractive and manageable for a promising kid from Leinster to want to take a shot at it in Limerick, Galway or Belfast.