Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

Anyone have a list handy of CC players by position?

Guessing it’s something like:

1 Porter
2 Sheehan
3 Furlong
4 McCarthy
5 Ryan
6 Beirne
7 Van der Flier
8 Doris
9 Gibson-Park
10 -
11 Lowe
12 Aki, Henshaw
13 Ringrose
14 Hansen
15 Keenan

Feel that's a pretty undeserving CC. He's not been great this season, very inconsistent

Yes. All three deserve to be on a central contract. The Top 3 Irish Locks. Drop off to next in line is vast.

McCarthy-Beirne 19.Ryan for France I think.

Ryan has to start, he's so much better than McCarthy at the nuts and bolts aspect of being a lock. I hope we attack their lineout for once. We have a load of good defensive jumpers, silly to not use them.

Ryan LO v McCarthy Carrying (& penalty concession)

With POM and Beirne starting I think Ireland will keep Ryan on the Bench.

It's not just the line out, Ryan is infinitely better clearing out rucks and making tackles. McCarthy is shockingly bad in that respect for a guy of his size

I'm with you on all of the positives on Ryan.

I could well be missing something but what i have seen from McCarthys tackling is an acceleration out of the line to the tackler and sometimes he falls off the tackle. Slows the carriers momentum though.

The point of difference for selection is that Ireland only have one real ball carrier in the pack. Doris. They need another.

Ryan is a great bench option for this game.

Either way I'd be happy enough with what the coaches go with.

Great that all 3 locks are available for this game in particular.

So the IRFU want us to believe that Ringrose was going to be released back to Leinster (for game time) last weekend thus counting the Cardiff game as a game missed from his 2 match ban

Yet, Crowley & Murray among others with considerably less game time in recent weeks had to stay in camp.

They're not doing themselves any favours.

Do we need him back for Italy? If Italy was a mid round game there's a good chance they'd have experimented with their selection.