Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

Casey was excellent and brought much needed tempo, alongside Crowley, to take the game from Oz as has been written about extensively in media. The piece I find more confusing here on Boards is the JGP debate. He was good. He wasn’t excellent as he normally is. But he was up against it with an abundance of handling errors , a dysfunctional lineout delivery, and a poor breakdown set up. In fairness any 9 with that set of challenges to deal with is going to suffer.

It's a sign that teams don't fear our line out. Coaches like Joe will take EVERYTHING they can get which is what was most alarming for me about the Australia match. On another day they'd have won that match, I think it was the end of their season and the back end of a long tour and they ran out of gas and focus to let us scrape to victory. People say its easy or straight forward to fix stuff like the line out or handling errors or discipline issues that see us giving up 12+ penalties, or the frankly astounding number of turnovers we conceded this Autumn (39 over 4 games). It's not, if it was Scotland would win every 6 Nations.

Sorry but what exactly did casey do in tests v south Africa to show he is the natural successor to JGP? He played in the first test and was taken off after 60 mins when we lost. He didn't play in the 2nd test Murray started and blade came off the bench.

He was steamrolled by Fiji 3 or 4 times in the frist few mins this November. He recovered well and played well for the rest of the game. He has a nice cameo v a tiring Australia side.

I like his energy ands skills but seeing him bounced around like a rag doll makes me question whether he is a legit candidate for test rugby. Its harder and harder for 9s and 10s to hide in defence the days.

Casey getting put on his arse by Fijian backrows or centres isn't a concern. Think we are trying too hard to find reasons not to pick guys.

JgP hasn't been at his best but he is still playing to a very high level.