Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

Wood captained Ireland 30 odd times, as far as I'm aware (and at a time when there were fewer internationals iirc). Even with Sheehan in the leadership group, I'd be surprised if he's ever handed the full-time captaincy, or gets near that mark tbh.

There's a difference between "Irish rugby" and "Irish rugby players" though.

To captain a Lions tour to SA where they played 22 matches, losing none, starting in and winning three of the Tests and drawing the last (due to a ref decision as dodgy as any other) is the greatest individual achievement in Irish rugby, as far as I'm concerned. The series win in NZ, I agree, is probably the greatest team achievement in Irish rugby.

…which wasn't exactly overflowing with strong alternatives.

Disagree. It was indeed a poor Ireland team, but there were really strong alternatives in both Mick Galwey and Anthony Foley. (Arguably a stronger group in terms of candidates for the captaincy than we have now).

In any case, I haven't made the argument that Sheehan "isn't a very strong leader". I've just made the argument that I don't think he's ahead of Woody in that regard.

Yeah, and tbc I'm not saying I think Sheehan is ahead of Wood either (in leadership), I'm just saying:

1. Players tend to improve their leadership as they age - and captains are likelier to be towards the end of their careers than the beginning. With that in mind - it's not a like for like comparison to compare Keith Wood's whole career in this regard to Dan Sheehan's career to date (when he's still just 26).
2. I don't think the gap is that large here either though. They're very different characters, but clearly Sheehan is already seen as a strong leader, given he's already captained Leinster, Ireland and the Lions. He captained Ireland in Cardiff when there were strong and experienced leaders like Peter O'Mahony, Tadhg Beirne, Jack Conan & Garry Ringrose in the starting XV. He captained the Lions when the team contained the current Scotland captain, the current Munster captain, a former Leinster club captain, a former Scotland co-captain and some other very experienced Lions and internationals (including Tadhg Furlong who has captained Ireland, Elliot Daly and Josh van der Flier).

The initial statement here was:

One area that Wood was undoubtedly better in is leadership - in some sense a more innate thing and a nebulous to teach / coach / train.

I don't think you've necessarily convinced on this argument.

I don't think you've necessarily convinced on this argument.

To be fair, I didn't necessarily expect to convince you, FTD :D

the amount of lions caps isnt a direct comparison either though since they were every 3 years rather than 4 and there were 4 tests in a series rather than 3

I never bought into that to be honest, he didn't just magically speed up at the end of his career. I was at his debut and attended most Munster matches, I don't subscribe to it to be honest.

I dunno, how do you quantify that?

Sheehan is the definition of a big game player who has stood up massively on some really big days - he scored two tries in a man-of-the-match performance for us to win the Grand Slam against England in 2023, scored two tries in the European Cup final in 2023, even has scored crucial tries for the Lions in each of the two tests to date.

I don’t think he’s a guy who coasts - he’s more often than not the standard setter who is our best performer in most games.

It’s crazy, for me, as good as he is, I still think he’s underrated globally and even possibly within Ireland.

I genuinely don’t think it is. I think his floor is exceptionally high and he has a great tendency to show up with big moments in big games.

We 100% take his performances for granted IMO.

Except all his medals.

Wood was the best hooker in the world for a couple of years.Sheehan has accomplished that when the bar is a lot higher and he has another 7-10 years in him.

There is simply no comparison.

I think some of your metrics for comparing them are a bit flawed - you’ve said a few times “Wood carried a bad team to wins” - but that’s not hugely true - he won 23 games total from 58 caps, and of that, 9 wins came against USA, Japan, Romania, Namibia and Russia, and the bulk of his remaining wins came against the usual suspects (Wales, Scotland, Italy) - the only wins of his whole career against Tier 1 teams were 2 wins against France, 1 against England and 1 against Australia.

I know he was in a bad side, but the argument about dragging the team to wins doesn’t stack up really.

Equally - I think it’s huge he won World Player of the Year, but don’t think Sheehan needs to win it to be considered better and wouldn’t overstate the importance of it either. Brian O’Driscoll never won it (Richie McCaw given a farcical one in 2009) and there have been some awards with significant subjectivity or skewed heavily by a small handful of performances (I.e Dusatoir in 2011).

I don't think recency bias comes into it really.

My argument about Sheehan being the better player is centered around their respective games - I think Wood was the substantially more flawed player, with a lot more weaknesses to his set piece game in particular.

The things Wood was really good at though as a player - his pace, aggression in the carry, physicality, work rate around the field - are all things that while I'm saying Wood was elite and the best of his era at that I think Sheehan is better again in every area.

He definitely brought a huge amount of leadership, energy and passion to a team, and Sheehan appears to be a somewhat more reserved character, but think there's a strong argument that both are viewed as very strong leaders.

I'm not pinning my argument to the success of the team or individual accolades, I'm just saying Dan Sheehan is comprehensively the better rugby player IMO.