Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

You need to go back and look at the EI squad if you think those players wouldn’t have been involved in the URC.

Frisch, Daly, Nash, Crowley, Ahern, Salanoa, Kendellen, Barron all would’ve been in Munster 23’s.

Your argument isn’t based in reality.

Main issue for Munster at the beginning of the 2022 season was that they had just finished pre-season with a completely new coaching team, bringing in a completely different playing style, and then lost a glut of players right when it came to stress-testing it.

On this point, Munster will be a lot more steady in October and should not be impacted as badly as 2022.

It's Ulster that would be my primary concern. Could you really make the case that their (predominantly) younger players will be better off leaving Richie Murphy for three weeks? Debatable, imo.

More broadly, I'm not sure I'd call this the IRFU disrespecting the URC, necessarily. But they definitely seem to be under-appreciating the increasing competitiveness of the league. Might just be semantics there.

Home knock-out games in the URC are now emerging as viable revenue generators for provinces. On the flipside, away knockout games in South Africa could be massively costly, in terms of finances and silverware. Every point counts.

Munster were missing 20 players at one point during the EI tour.

Nobody would be arguing that has no impact if it was from injuries alone.

Jack Kelly? KLEYN?

I think Kelly just got his timing wrong with Leinster. He was trying to break in and get minutes when there wasn't much gametime on offer. And yes, he struggled to perform when he did see some action. Then he went to play 7s. I think it would have been better if he sharpened his skills playing 7s while he was in the Academy and there wasn't much Leinster gametime on offer anyway, like Keenan and JOB did. They were able to hit the ground running when the door did open for them in terms of getting into the Leinster team. Kelly's got good pedigree as an age grade 15s player, and he's done very well with the 7s. Put those two things together and I think you're probably looking at an athletic player with a well-rounded skilset who could potentially do very well if he returned to 15s.

Kleyn pushing from the second row would help inexperienced tightheads like Barrett or Foxe survive in the scrum against grizzled Currie Cup veterans. I was thinking Ulster would need Wilson (who would be the obvious pick otherwise), Leinster would need Clarkson, and Connacht would need Aungier. But perhaps if Tom O'Toole is available to play URC Wilson can go without it affecting Ulster too much.

Now Cheslin Kolbe trying to ratchet things up with bizarre statements;

“There’s been a lot of talk about Ireland deserving to win the World Cup, we’ll see in July.”

Really? Who has said that we deserved to win the World Cup?

Is it that hard to motivate themselves that they need all this crap? Are ticket sales slow?

https://www.independent.ie/sport/rugby/well-see-in-july-south-africas-cheslin-kolbe-wants-to-silence-claims-that-ireland-deserved-to-win-the-world-cup/a793618007.html