Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

That Marx turnover was such a big moment, and it looked like an incredibly wrong call, with van Staden clearly on the wrong side and blocking the clear out. He gave that exact call earlier in the game, and this one was even more obvious.

I noticed a considerable drop off towards the tail end of the season compared to the first half, where he was consistently making a significantly greater impact to the game and in my point of view should have started ahead of POM during the 6 nations.

Don't feel Baird had a great game in any of the key knockouts and was pretty poor in some of them, emphasised by some big individual mistakes.

Quite likely it was in part at least physical or mentally tiredness, his minutes increased by 50% over the previous season.

Whether his impact during that run of worse form was greater or lesser than POM right now is up for debate but the argument isn't as strong as it was earlier in the season.

Wasn't saying you were questioning Lowe. I stated:

not sure how anyone is blaming Lowe for that one.

I'd seen the poster you quoted and others questioning Lowe's actions but it makes no sense to me

You keep having these weird pops at Joe McCarthy that just aren’t justified. He had a perfectly fine game yesterday, and arguably outplayed his opposite man, Eben Etzebeth.

Out scrum was really good with him on the field and he showed up for some good carries and big hits.

And what did Etzebeth do that was so noteworthy?

McCarthy had more carries (6 v 3) for more metres (11m v 4m), they made a similar number of tackles (8 for Etzebeth v 7 for McCarthy). Neither had any turnovers won or lineout steals. Both left the field after 49 mins. The Irish scrum was probably in the ascendency for that period, and was unlucky not to be rewarded with penalties on at least 2 occasions.

Looked at it again there, Kolbe is actually miles away when Lowe leaps for the ball, but is running at full tilt in anticipation. Aki is closest to him, Murray is closest to Lowe and just isn't looking at all, and Frawley is closest to the Irish line. Frawley gets closest to the ball, but Kolbe gets there first and dinks it past him.

All three (Frawley, Murray and Aki) were at fault for not watching the play and not reacting quick enough.

There isn't enough time in those instances to have a quick glance around and see where all of your support players are - you have to just assume they'll be alert too to the possibility of the kick falling short. Lowe does his job, the other three do not.