Leinster Team Talk Thread (Love you Furlong time)

Feels like almost every year we lose to a team who makes a specific game plan for us. Northampton, La Rochelle, and the Bulls.

Leinster confirm that Rory McGuire, Aitzol King and Ben Brownlee are leaving at the end of the season.

Not sure where they're off to, but I know Brownlee was training down south earlier this season and that McGuire has been linked with Ulster.

But surprised by King's departure. He has looked handy every time I've seen him. Been more impressed by him than Andrew Osborne anyway.

Yeah I think Brownlee will be going to Munster

Is he the best 12 in the world? He certainly didn't look it on Saturday. Again, the point is whatever malaise affected Henshaw and everyone else also seemed to impact Barrett, so picking him to start might have made a difference, it might not.

I think it's incredibly unlikely that Cullen picked Henshaw to give him a shot at the Lions.

 so picking him to start might have made a difference, it might not.

This is open to debate, but why even leave it open to debate when starting Barrett was clearly the right call?

(I will add, it's possible there are IRFU stipulations here on Barrett's minutes, and if there are, that is unfair on Cullen. He could be copping a lot of the flak for something that is out of his hands; I don't see what that needs to be "top secret").

Leo himself came out and said there were no restrictions on starting Barrett, so this whole "IRFU stipulations" excuse doesn’t really hold water. If there were any limits, Cullen would have been the first to mention it. At the end of the day, it's his decisions on the field and his inability to get the team firing when it counts.

This feels like trying to rewrite reality to avoid criticising over this pick.

Feel free not to engage but if you do, can you leave this sort of thing out? It's deeply unhelpful and completely unnecessary.

Henshaw has been playing well this season. The idea that he was a charity pick to give him a jaunt to Australia doesn't hold up at all. We had been rotating the centres like clockwork in the previous knockouts, it was pre-ordained that Barrett would come on at 50 minutes and there was loads and loads of time for him to impact the game, but he didn't.

If I said that "carrying hard" was a good return from the best 12 in the world at a time when we needed something extra to lift us out of a funk, I'd be rightly laughed at.

You are literally the only person I have seen trying to suggest this pick wasn't a problem.

Again, I don't think this is necessary and I would prefer if you left it out. Picking Henshaw might have been a mistake, but I don't reallly see any evidence that it was tbh.

In an attempt to get away from this black hole of negativity, we have two games of the regular season coming up before a two week gap until the URC knockouts begin. I hope we pick strong sides for the Zebre and Glasgow games.

We need to rebuild momentum going into the playoffs, but also get our players back into a regular rhythm of week to week matches. Do that and we've a great chance of winning the tournament. The way the matches fall for this means we have a potential 5 fixtures all of which are at home.

The fixture against Glasgow is also important psychologically. There's a good chance we'll play them again in the knockouts. We hammered them a month ago. Beat them again by a decent scoreline and they're the ones feeling the pressure to perform against us.

It's being redeveloped. Donnybrook or the Aviva....

Rob Russell and Liam Turner both confirmed to be leaving Leinster at the end of the season as well.

They were fringe players so makes sense for them to look elsewhere, but we're thinning out a bit at wing and centre. We'll be hoping a few more academy players develop quickly.

They're may also be a case for Ross Byrne to start ahead of Prendergast too. It's cup rugby and Predergast is talented but his ability in the contact is nowhere near where it needs to be at the business end of the season. Byrne isn't an outstanding defender but he is functional. Again, sentiment and player development need to go out the window in a must win crunch game. Easy to say in hindsight but perhaps Byrne would have been a better choice at 10 also for the first 60 mins.

Hope Byrne does well across the Irish Sea, a good guy and an honest pro.