Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

He has the skills. Other countries don’t worry about putting in raw talent. We wait until they are 26 and have played most of their rugby at 12 and 15

When the media treat you like God's, you start to believe the hype yourself.

All Blacks simply too good for them, even playing average.

Great under achievers, but sure we have to hear about their kids, their weddings, their engagements etc, cos they are Irish rugby players.

RwC 2019 was as bad.

With an aging team, there's always the feeling that it could all fall apart very suddenly. While I don't think that's what happened tonight, it was certainly our worst performance in a long time.

My biggest concern is the drastic disimprovement in our attack. You don't need all singing, all dancing multi phase attacking shapes to win games, but it has been our USP and has been the foundation of grand slams, tour wins, world number one, etc. Without it, what do we excel at?

It was also about as poor an impact as I've ever seen from a set of subs. Despite all of our success at senior and u20 level, we still have very little depth. South Africa have a bench full of players they want to get on the pitch, we have multiple that we don't seem to want to use at all.

Frawley was utterly dreadful but at least he tried to organise some shape around him. I just don't buy the idea that you can take a player who doesn't play consistently at 10 and bring him in an the top level, and consistently get results.

We clearly had a good plan going into the game. Put the New Zealand ruck under huge pressure and stopped their 9 from getting the ball out with any sort of speed. He was hooked early because he was having an awful game. Our defence was generally solid, despite the missed tackles and we held New Zealand try less for 65-70 minutes.

I don't think we could have foreseen such an awful attacking performance though. It wasn't just the dropped passes and knock ons either. We were too flat to the gain line and just begging to be hit behind it. If we didn't drop the ball we invariably were behind from where we started.

My god, Id say its about 10 years since i posted on boards but holy christ that was so bad. No1 me hole. We cannot even catch a ball. Worst performance since 2019 England. Theres a load of lads that need to be cleaned out. Henderson is done.

what were these gobshites doing in Portugal all weak playing touch butt, pathetic performance. I dont mind losing games to good teams but on home soil to show zero passio, hunger or fight is just pathetic.

Squads looking very end of schmidt era atm, new blood needs to be brought in as that squads getting stale, A bench of henderson, herring and healy is not remotely good enough for a side that has ambitions of being a top 3 side in the world

Bad night for: Bealham, Herring, Crowley, Frawley, Aki, Henderson

Good night for: Kelliher, Porter, JGP, Beirne, vdF, Doris

Average night for: Lowe, Hansen, Osborne

Anonymous night for: O'Mahony, Murray, McCarthy, Keenan, Healy, Healy, Ringrose

Coaches need to take a good look at themselves. NZ could easily have been beaten there. Handing McKenzie easy 3 pointers was ridiculous.

Great shout, it was that poor. It reminded me of a game we lost 12-6 to England in the 2013 6N.