Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

Healy left to get a shot at International game time which wasn't coming in Ireland. Yes, people were disappointed to lose him but established players make those decisions all the time. It's not the same as the IRFU recognising there is a surplus of good players coming out of Leinster schools and asking a question about how best tot use them to bring success to Ireland. Warming the bench for years at Leinster is not the answer to that question.

I know people are greedy but no matter how some would like it. It cant be just a bad thing with young players not getting game time at Leinster so it would mad to create a new system where only Leinster have to share good school players. Leinster school players going to other provinces would regularly lead to surplus when their own crops come through. A new system would need to share good school players across all provinces - in my earlier example you ignored Penny and Deegan go to Munster then they end up losing Kendellen and Gleeson.

No-one is forcing anyone to do anything. No-one has the right to an IRFU sponsored multi year training program to become a professional rugby player. That s a major investment on the part of the union and by extension every rugby player and fan in Ireland. Being offered an academy spot or a squad place in one of the IRFU owned teams is not some sort of punishment. People are quick to regard young rugby players as children who need to be near their mammies, no-one feels like that about nurses or students.

If you're not forcing them to go to a certain province if they want to join an academy then what the hell are you talking about?

Forcing players to move provinces is a valid opinion to have, I just thoroughly disagree with it. It is impossible to have a discussion when people wont call a spade a spade.

What are you actually talking about?

Are you talking about Connacht taking young players from Leinster straight into their academy, poaching from the Leinster academy or taking from the Leinster senior squad?

There are c. 23 or 24 guys from Leinster in the Connacht squad and academy, plus another 3 or 4 who went to school in Leinster, yet you are constantly moaning about wanting more Leinster players to move to Connacht.

What if the kid had got enough points to get offers from both but some overseeing body ordered the offer from one withheld to engineer him going where they wanted?

32 of the players on that list were in the Leinster Academy.

Cool beans.

And as far as I can see, precisely one of them - Rory McGuire - is at Ulster. That's Leinster Academy doing "an awful lot of work" on behalf of Ulster?

Aitzol King is at Ulster, John Cooney and David O’Connor aren’t long out the door.

Leinster’s underage structures had a considerable amount of development in Jack Murphy, Sam Berman, Will de Klerk and Tom Brigg too. The fact Jack Murphy was around the place a wet week and was starting games at 10 is a fairly clear illustration of that.

David O'Connor? Really?

Look, you said Leinster Academy, and now it's all about "underage structures". You were gently fact-checked.

Yeah, I guessed there would be push back on the list (though the majority have gone through the Leinster academy) but it is stark and underlines the basic point that Leinster schools produce and massive surplus of players that Irish rugby benefits from and that's the persecutive I think we should be seeing it through. It has something to do with Leinster Rugby, though of course their academy is the main beneficiary of that school pipeline. Other provinces benefit from both the schools output and often (more than half that list) from what's being done in Leinster's academy. But from an Irish pov are we getting everything we can out of the schools pipeline or are we losing some potential to Leinster's over abundance?

Paul can fight his own battles but this….

the first post I responded to was your utterly nonsensical post that Leinster or the Academy had had nothing to do with the list provided

…is misrepresenting what he was saying. He didn't say anything like that. He specifically said:

Leinster Academy has done zero for a number of those players.

He was right for something like 35 out of the 67, right?

No, fwiw, he wasn’t.

The vast majority of players on that list were in the sub-academy or played in Leinster underage sides.

@ersatz ’s original point of Leinster generally doing a lot of heavy lifting for the other provinces is an absolutely true statement.

But, as per usual, you’re here for bullshit nitpicking instead of actually making any substantive points.

Calling a spade a spade is not melodramatic.

Of course players don't have the right to play wherever they want - however we are talking about situations where both a player and their local province want him to play for them.

Instead you want to tell that kid that if he wants to continue towards professional rugby in this country he must move and go to college on the other side of the country.

I don't even understand where you're coming from at this stage. You seem to be proposing we need to move to a 'to hell or to Connacht/Ulster/Munster' model while also posting evidence that 60+ Leinster developed guys are playing elsewhere - which to me is a sign of system that is functioning quite well. How many Leinster players playing elsewhere is enough?

If you want to be precise, are you claiming that the academy and sub-academy are completely different entities? That no academy resources are utilized on sub-academy or underage players?