Leinster Team Talk Thread (Love you Furlong time)

Very strange leaving arguably your best player on the bench, Barrett would probably only have 4 meaningful games left for Leinster, 2 x semis and 2 x finals. It's underutilising your best asset for little or no benefit apart from resting him

Listening to the Indo Rugby podcast and they make a good point about Leinster being far stronger squad wise this season than compared to last. The signings have helped massively, but we also had a fair amount of injuries going into the game at Croke Park. Our backline for this weekend will especially be different.

Last season Frawley started at fullback, Larmour was on the wing, Osborne started at 13 and Moloney was in the second row. They're all good players, but the players that will start this weekend are all better. You also have Sam Prendergast who is already quite a bit better than Ross Byrne. At least when it comes to the more attacking side of things.

Is there any update on ticket sales? Still loads of seats left on TM and hard to know what sections are even open/closed. As per usual EPCR completely taking the piss with ticket prices.

it should have been an easy sell. Especially well priced family tickets given the weekend and the kick off time.

This might be the most SoCoDu thing i'm ever gonna write but….

Anyone know where the best bet to park a cargo bike up would be around Lansdowne? Bringing one of the youngsters, and no darts has now complicated things.

If you want to be cheeky you can try the car park of revenue building on the other end of Lansdowne road beside the IRFU head office.

AFAIK the security station isn't manned on weekends (not that they'd care anyway) and there's bike lock space just beside it.

The only thing I can think of is that the player/new zealand had it written in his contract that he only play x number games/minutes while at Leinster.

Have Leinster stated there aren't restrictions on Barrett starting ahead of Ireland internationals? Maybe it's like the deal with Snyman, and they're not allowed to select Barrett over Henshaw in crunch games.

Leinster do a pretty good job of not biting the hand that feeds them or at least only biting it selectively. They paint a picture of what the IRFU says they want to see.

Saturday is obviously a must win but far lower risk of a loss than either team they would potentially face in the final. Starting Barrett this weekend over either Ringrose or Henshaw would cause a decent sized storm, especially with the guaranteed petrol thrown on the fire from the usual social media moaners and media looking for clicks.

Rather than dealing with this blowback, they take the minimal risk of keeping Barrett in reserve for this game, allowing themselves full freedom to do what they want in the final.

It is also an example of relying on Irish players for most games they can then point to when making requests to bring in players in the future, the likes of Ioane.

Other provinces seem to take the opposite approach and nearly go out of their way to paint a poor picture for to the IRFU and then wonder why they dont get their way.

People are massively overthinking this and, as always, defaulting to the most negative assumptions.

What substitution loophole?

I doubt that's the reason they do it though.