Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

I saw Murray Kinsella post something tangential to this earlier.

By way of comparison, I did the same for Ireland this year, across our 9 selections. Our average appears to be 4.9.

Now, the devil is in the detail (e.g. how many enforced, opposition changes, how many total players used etc. isn't clear), and obviously SA have more depth than us, but it does appear that, from one game to the next, Farrell is significantly more conservative than Rassie, who's often thought of as picking narrowly from the same core.

Didn’t he pick a completely different 15 in Argentina which will skew the data quite a bit.

35 year old Willie Le Roux too

Is that not the point tho? If he's still picking Mapimpi, Am and Le Roux, yet still has more changes, squad-to-squad, than us would that not indicate we're even more conservative?

I also had a look at this after I saw that tweet earlier. By my reckoning, the Boks have changed on average 10.2 players in the First XV across the 12 games in scope (including their selection for England this weekend), and 15.3 on average in the wider 23.

Ireland, by contrast, have changed (by my tally) 3.75 players in the first XV and 7.75 across the wider 23 (including this week's game).

But the level of Springboks changes is because of a couple of things IMO:

(a) Rassie employed effectively two different 23s almost for a lot of the Rugby Championship - making wholesale changes week over week for the home and away games.

(b) They played Portugal the week after playing us, and changed the entire first XV and 22 out of 23.

When you look at how many players they've actually used this year (and considering after this weekend they'll have played 3 extra games than us), they have used 12 players more than us (49 v 37). 6 of the additional 12 featured against Portugal and Portugal only.

I would wager if we had had a fixture against the likes of a Portugal then you would see a lot more new players involved for us who haven't yet been used this year, and there almost certainly will be a few further ones involved for the Fiji game.

When you consider the sheer quantum of players they have versus us, I don't think it looks like they're picking much more widely than we are, and I feel we've been relatively fortunate with injuries this year too.

More telling stat for me is that if you look back to the start of 2020 (or the end of the 2019 RWC) - Ireland have given debut caps to 37 different players, whereas SA have given caps to just 28 over the timeframe. Obviously they've an elite settled world champion squad, but to me that does reflect how settled they are.

A decent comparison would be with New Zealand, as they have a similar central contract system, and they want to win every match, and they don't select overseas players.

A fair point. I've had the quickest of looks so the number might not be 100% accurate, but it looks like they have on average 5.5 personnel changes per game.

Having said that, they have big spikes in changes before and after both the Fiji and Japan games. (10 & 9, and 12 & 11 changes respectively) whereas our biggest spike is before and after the Italy game (7 and 8 changes respectively).

This is reflected if you look at respective median's, we make 4.5 changes, NZ only make 3.

So it looks like, on balance, they are being more conservative than we are.

If people are trying to say we should replicate Rassie then sorry we will fail…

I don't think anyone has said this… I just thought it'd be an interesting comparison vs what is considered a conservative selector.

But four is more than zero, right? I mean, I know we're struggling to agree on a lot of things these days but…

This also ignores the fact that when SA were naming the most experienced XV in history for the first test, we were throwing a 22-year old in for his test debut (in his less favoured position), which was also pretty unpopular in certain circles. Is that not a measure of conservatism?

For me, in getting the numbers I posted above, I literally started with the team for their respective first games of the year (Wales for SA, France for Ireland) and then side by side posted the 23s for every game.

I counted all of the game over game changes (I.e full XV changed from Ireland Test 2 to Portugal, and 22 of 23 changed), and then summed up the total number of changes, and then divided that by the number of games -1 (to account for the first game - I effectively just got the average of the games where they made changes).

As you say though, they made wholesale changes for some of those games which skewed the numbers slightly.

As I mentioned above, the more telling stat for me is how many players they used, and on that metric, even with 3 extra games, they used 12 players more than us (5 players more if you exclude the Portugal and Wales games as some players played in only those games).

By season’s end - that metric (number of players used) will be even tighter, because we’re going to use some new players against Fiji in all likelihood (and possibly against Australia) and they’re probably only likely to use max 1 new player (Jean Kleyn) as the rest of their travelling squad has already played this season.

My point is 4 changes to the start 15 sounds like a lot.

When you add the context that it amounted to 3 personnel changes to the 23, and all of them were injured enforced, it is in fact more conservative than it sounds.

I think that's a completely fair observation to add tbh.

But sure, 4 is more than 0, FFF…