Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

just to be clear, you introduced these stats as evidence that Farrell is conservative. The 8.5 number for SA includes injury enforced changes also, does it not?

When the same stats don’t support your position, you dismiss it. If we can agree it’s all meaningless, happy days. Reading into SA rugby spin is a bad road IMO.

Most likely Rassies weird obsession and outright contempt for Ireland forced him to go full strength, which made tying the series with an understrength squad even sweeter.

Andy backs youth , no debate , ahead of the provinces every time . Agree give me Andy over Rassie every time. After beating Argentina, Fiji & Australia he will be a hero again

During the world cup he went full strength in all the games, an opportunity was missed to rest a few players, the younger less experienced lads should have been brought in for at least one game. I'm not saying thats the reason we didn't make it to the semi-final but I heard it said by a few commentators.

Which is reasonable, but that's going to be baked into the SA stats too. (You'd imagine that could even out over a bigger sample).

But it does beg the question, but for injury, would those (or other) changes have happened.

it wasn’t at the expense of the Provinces in fairness as game time is valuable for the next generation in any format. And the EI selection was not the best emerging irish players as the tag implies, it was the best EI players that were available and more importantly that suited the management of the provinces. It was a negotiated position which is healthy and a good approach

Again, and this is the key thing.

Taking a team with many multiples of the player pool that we have, who played tests against teams nowhere near true test level, and using the fact that they played more players than us as evidence of Farrell being conservative is simplistic at best and downright dishonest at worst.

Why Rassie is even relevant between matches against NZ and Argentina is unclear.

People get very upset when I suggest that Farrell isn’t liked by a minority but the evidence continues to mount

Jesus, obviously I’m not saying it’s exactly like a 6N. I should probably also have obviously said we don’t play the 6N countries all necessarily too.

I was using it as an analogy that we were aiming to build momentum.

It surely isn’t necessarily to jump on every little thing I post to try and nitpick to this kind of degree.

Edit: we also obviously did have one gap week (5 teams in the groups) so the difference is hardly that stark. We had a week off basically between SA and Scotland.

FWIW - this is also broadly my view of it. I wouldn’t have minded seeing a little more change in the squad and a few extra players used during the 6N, but I wouldn’t have proposed wholesale changes as winning the competition is still hugely significant for me.

Outside of that - he was never going to make massive changes for SA or NZ (like they didn’t for us either) and I think if we’d played better last week he would have made more changes for the game this week.

The first EI tour absolutely was at the expense of the Provinces. I've said it on here plenty, Munster were left with a back 3 with exactly 1 appearance in their respective positions for them, and 2 academy wingers starting.

This time round was significantly better, but still impacted some depth with injuries.

I don’t necessarily agree - he has a track record of making changes in November games. He has spoken this week about how we “could have made more changes” but he’s giving guys an opportunity to react.

Worth remembering we haven’t lost back to back games under Farrell since November 2020.

I also don’t accept the premise he’s naturally a conservative selector - I think there are plenty of examples of him going in unexpected directions (Dropping Jack Crowley in v Australia (when Ross Byrne would have been the easier safer option), backing Joe McCarthy in Paris, starting Jamie Osborne at 15 in SA, plucking Mack Hansen in to start the 2022 6N etc.

Ireland and SA would always have less turnover and changes over the past few years anyway - we’ve been the best and most successful sides on our respective hemisphere’s so naturally are a bit more settled. I’d wager it’s safe Wales have made a hell of a lot more changes this year than us, but I know where I’d rather be.

Joe Mc Carthy was such an obvious one to bring in but yes i'll give Farrell credit for that one if you want. Would Osborne have been included of keenan hadn't been away with 7's Olympic squad. Hansen was a good call.