Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

I dunno - he picked him again in the RWC training squad well after his poor performance against the NZ XV.

In that case, they went into camp in Carton House in early July (10th July 2023), and Coombes was amongst the players dropped over a month later on August 16th.

That's a month worth of training etc where he's getting observed incredibly closely by the management team. It has to stand to reason that he isn't doing what they want him to do. He's slipping further down the back row pecking order, as even with Conan missing this squad he is still behind guys like Timoney & Prendergast (who are undisputed back rowers, if you want to say Izuchukwu is included as a quasi-lock).

They've spent a lot of time looking at Gavin Coombes at this stage, and he doesn't seem to have progressed in their thinking in that time.

My point wasn't necessarily that we're lacking depth, it's just that outside of the back row we don't have many players smashing the door down to earn a starting position. Front row, half back and back three in particular, not much to argue about !

The stats thing has been trotted out a lot here on Coombes over the past day or so, but they're really just pure volume stats.

I had a look comparing the 23/24 season for all three of Gavin Coombes, Jack Conan and Caelan Doris.

Coombes played in 25 games, 1,700 minutes, starting 20 of those 25. While his carry and tackle volume are huge (293 carries and 287 made tackles), once again when you look at the actual impact of those carries, you see he carries for 2m per carry on average.

Jack Conan didn't play a lot of minutes this season - 829 mins for both Leinster and Ireland, but he averages 3.5m per carry, so while he played 871 minutes less than Coombes (almost 11 full games less), he only carried for 119 less metres. His tackle volume isn't as high as Coombes, but his completed tackle percentages are slightly higher (both are very good at 92% and 91%).

But the comparison to Caelan Doris is the one that really shows up the disparity - Doris played in an extra 3 games and played 298 minutes more than Coombes. He has 10 more carries than Coombes over that period (303 v 293), made 25 tackles more, and had more clean breaks (5 v 2), defenders beaten (59 v 25) and offloads (18 v 12). His tackle completion stats are 90% (v Coombes at 91%). He had 10 carries more than Coombes, but carried for 438m more than him - his average is 3.4 metres per carry versus Coombes' 2.0m.

So - statistically, he outperformed him on every single metric (only negative is his penalty count is almost twice as high as Coombes, and is pretty high overall at 25 on the season).

However - when you step into the actual games, it's even more telling. Of Coombes' 25 games played, he carried over his 2.0m per carry season average on 12 occasions (Dragons, Ulster x2, Glasgow x2, Connacht, Scarlets, Zebre, Ospreys, Toulon, Northampton (knock out), Bulls, Lions).

His best days - days where his carry average was higher than Jack Conan's or Caelan Doris' level happened only 4 times - Toulon away (he was excellent that day), Bulls away, Lions away and Glasgow. In all three of the latter games however he started on the bench and had a very low volume of carries (6, 3 and 1 respectively).

Caelan Doris only had 4 games all year where his per carry average for the game was below Coombe's season mark (2.0m per carry).

Doris also played a considerably more difficult slate of fixtures than Coombes - his stats include games against New Zealand, South Africa, La Rochelle x2, Toulouse etc.

I know these are relatively simplistic stats (would love to have access to better data) - but they do serve to show that the people claiming Coombes' stats are incredible are missing the mark.

Doris is by any metric a more effective carrier and is just as efficient a tackler off an even larger sample size. He offloads more, passes more and beats more than twice as many defenders off a really similar carry count.

I know some of Coombes' numbers are coloured by the period he played in the row (his stats were particularly poor for the games against Exeter, Leinster (in Thomond) and Connacht on NYD), but there were plenty of games where he was definitely exclusively at 8 where his numbers are incredibly underwhelming too.

Doris absolutely doesn't carry in outside channels, I genuinely struggle to even think of a handful of examples of when he does that. He typically carries right in the middle of the pitch and typically off set pieces etc.

I know average carry stats are prone to scrutiny - i.e. one big carry could skew the sample in a whole game, but we're talking about guys here who play the same position and we're talking over a full season.