Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

you only assess Prenderghasts last few minutes and not the total game?

It's a BS explanation if how that interception happened, but I thought he played pretty close to the line generally through the game. I don't mean he took the ball flat every time, but he did it quite a bit through the game.

It's absolutely not the reason for the interception in that case. It was a very tired phase with some terrible decision making. Henshaw took the pass and didn't move forward, just passed it back. That's bad. Maybe there was a miscommunication where Henshaw thought Prendergast called a loop play, Sam didnt look like he was expecting it. And when Sam got the ball back, he should have done what Henshaw should have done and carried the ball forward.

Terrible phase of play by both of them. It was bad play by SP but he wasn't alone

Is our turnover of national squad players statistically similar to other top teams? On the one hand, too much churn is not a good thing but not having enough change could be a problem too. So where do we stand on that?

I'd say it's hard to tell it will be skewed by the Italy games in 6n, Fiji/Georgia/Japan games in Autumn and summer games againt Portugal.

I'd say the full starting team has very low churn. Some of it is lack of options like playing Cian Healy until he was ready to draw the pension. Similar situation with Sexton. Then they also played the likes of POM and Murray longer than you'd expect.

Part of it is down to the player welfare meaning players can go a bit longer without being worn-out. I think there's a conservatism in letting young players take the jersey. I think we'll see that if they play Henshaw or Aki ahead of Osborne at 12. But, Aki was hood enough to play Lions this summer so he's not making it easy to drop him.

I would pull the trigger and give Osborne the start for the autumn games, but nobody pays me for my opinions on selection.

seedings for world cup are awarded after the november intls

You're confusing correlation and causation. You're saying "under Crowley" when it's far more accurate to say "with Crowley". He was pretty peripheral in the France 2024 game and, let's be honest, it was a lot more to do with France's implosion than anything great we were doing.

In 2024, we beat Italy 36-0. In 2025, we fell over the line 22-17 even though they played the entire second half with 14 men and only Dan Sheehan could save us.

By your logic, we should blame the out-half who played in 2025 and replace him with the guy who played in 2024.

The fact that they're the same person would seem to indicate that you can't always attribute results to the out-half alone.

There are plenty of rational and reasonable arguments for Crowley without needing these bizarre thought experiments.

For what it's worth, just before those two touches by Sam he does call something to the backs if you watch the highlights. Only he/they know if what came after is what was called or was it a range of other possibilities mentioned previously as to why it played out the way it did.

Don't ever let actual facts get in the way of big bold declarative statements anyway.

Since Farrell took over, at the beginning of the 2020 6N, he has awarded new caps to 49 players. That number is higher than the total number of new caps awarded over the same period by South Africa (36 players) and New Zealand (43 players), and only marginally lower than France and England (both on 56 players), but both with significantly larger playing pools and numbers of professional clubs.

Every single team has a broadly similar trends of awarding batches of new caps in summer tests etc. In the case of Ireland, we awarded 8 new caps v USA in July 2021 and then 6 v Georgia this summer, with 3 v Portugal. We did award a good chunk of new caps (10 caps - 20%) in 6 Nations games.

This figure is directly comparable to South Africa - of the 36 new caps over the period, only 7 (19%) came in 'competitive' games (Rugby Championship or tournaments), and the vast majority came in large blocks (8 players v Wales in summer 2022), 4 v Wales in Summer 2024, 7 v Portugal in summer 2024, 4 v Italy in summer 2025 and 3 v Georgia in summer 2025.

The French stats are skewed heavily by them consistently electing to tour in summer with fully rotated squads and almost no first line players; i.e. 13 new caps v Australia in summer 2021, 4 v Japan summer 2022, 8 v Argentina in summer 2024 etc. England have the exact same dynamic - 6 new caps v USA this summer, 12 new caps v USA in summer 2021, 4 v Canada in summer 2021 etc.

It's also worth noting that we've been consistently competing for success over this period - we've won 2 Championships and narrowly lost out on two other occasions. We've also toured difficult locations like New Zealand and South Africa.

The notion that Farrell is more conservative than others is demonstrably false.

Finally, on the Irish team being more highly concentrated - it's probably because over the past four seasons that one team has won 20 out of 24 games against the other three provinces, and have won 17 out of their last 20 games v Munster, 15 of the last 20 v Ulster and 18 of the last 20 v Connacht.

That's the real concern. If the RWC was tomorrow, we'd be in a situation where the weakest player in the starting XV is the out-half, regardless of who we pick. That's not a recipe for success.

We need at least one to improve a fair bit in the next 18 months (and preferably both, obvs). But I would be pretty optimistic on that front.

They Made this point on the Left Wing podcast. Almost every other position in the Ireland team is covered by a Lion. I'd say there's s good argument that 10 is the weakest position in the Ireland team. That's a huge change from the ROG and Sexton days. That's 20 years with a world class 10.

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