Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

When the starting 10 was that poor it's hard not to talk about it TBF.

Oh it's all Garry Ringrose's, a player who plays 2 positions outside Crowley, fault of course. You know how this works right? The 10 serves the players outside him, not the other way around. Maybe Ringrose didn't pass because of the garbage being served up to him?

He was rubbish. His kicking from hand was straight up 0/10 and he created absolutely nothing.

This scapegoating of certain players is just tiresome at this stage.

We had no line out, a mediocre scrum, no protection of the ruck and an average defensive performance…when that’s the case it doesn’t matter who you have at 10, you are likely going to lose, especially against a side as good as NZL…add in the fact that our XV had on average 114 minutes played per player and you are likely going to fall away in the final 20 versus a side who have been together for 8-9 games previously.

It doesn’t matter who we have at 10/13, if we are falling in all the area’s above then we are going nowhere fast, all a great performance from your 10/13 will do is help paper over the cracks.

The other issue with the lineout is that even when we win it we have no plan as to what to do with the ball, when was the last time we actually had an affective maul? It seems we just win it, release the ball instantly to the 12, crash ball and repeat. This is why I’m starting to worry about Ireland under Farrell, one thing I always admired about him was the standards were set high and the players had no excuse to under perform…that seems to be gone now, we just make excuses to accept having a mediocre lineout. Teams know we are no threat from the lineout and know we don’t like taking their 3 points so have no fear conceding penalties against us.

seriously, how does POC still have a job?

All of which overlooks the fact that, as a team, we kicked significantly more frequently when Crowley was on the pitch as it coincided with Marcus Smith moving to full back. You can ignore that if you want but that is all part of the context. And that tactic worked really well, fwiw.

But ultimately this…

Respectfully

…is all I was asking for.

MOD EDIT

Warning issued

Moving on to next week; the McCloskey injury is really frustrating. I had hoped for four big weeks from him, and maybe he grabs that jersey.

I think, frustratingly, he's going to keep a lot of the same players in the saddle for this one, but hope we'll see some changes.

This is the 23 I'd like to see:

(15-9,1-8):

Jimmy O'Brien, Tommy O'Brien, Tom Farrell, Jamie Osborne, Jacob Stockdale, Jack Crowley, Craig Casey, Paddy McCarthy, Ronan Kelleher, Tom Clarkson, James Ryan, Tadhg Beirne (assuming no suspension), Ryan Baird, Nick Timoney, Caelan Doris

Reps: Gus McCarthy, Jack Boyle, Finlay Bealham, Tom Ahern, Jack Conan, Caolin Blade, Sam Prendergast, Garry Ringrose

Assuming McCloskey is injured

With the following side facing Spain:

Michael Lowry, Robert Baloucoune, Jude Postlethwaite, Dan Kelly, Shayne Bolton, Harry Byrne, Ben Murphy, Michael Milne, Tom Stewart, Tom O'Toole, Evan O'Connell, Darragh Murray, Alex Soroka, Ruadhan Quinn, David McCann

Reps: Lee Barron, Alex Usanov, Scott Wilson, Diarmuid Mangan, Sean Jansen, Fintan Gunne, Jack Murphy, Zac Ward

Assuming James Culhane is injured

There isn’t a “big gulf”, if you did a combined XV pre game you’d likely have more Irish in a combined team and worst would have a similar amount.

I get France who is this mysterious 2nd team in the NH that’s ahead, please don’t tell me you are actually referring to England 😂.

And no let’s not adjust expectations, how about our World Class/ World XV actually play like World XV players…lowering expectations is going to make things worse.

I don't see how you you could have more Irish in a combined xv. Yes I think England are probably a better team now. They definitely have way more depth. That is borne out by the bookies odds too. I know its not what we want to hear but it's the truth objectively.

I am not saying we can never beat these teams if we get things right and there always improvements to be made. We don't have the depth of talent of some of our closest competitors.

Probably because the combined XV was made pre game, it’s easy to look better when you are NZL at the weekend when you consider the position they were in going into the game compared to an undercooked Ireland side.

England are more like the new shiny toy, they’ve yet to show anything of note that they are A. A better side and B. Have more depth….not unlike them to get carried away after a good result though. It’s not objectively true, it’s bollocks. Yeah we do, that was reflected in the Lions selection.

As long as POC is there it won’t be sorted, he’s no reason to sort it as there appears to be no standards set in this regard.

Let’s just continue with a duff line out, and as a result no line out plays, no maul, no plays off the maul etc and see how that goes against top sides moving forward.

Not worried about lineout, its been brutal for 3 or 4 years now, we cough up 3 or 4 per game, and our scrum is always seems to be under pressure

The worst part about the lineout is it seems to actually be getting worse… you think to 2023, it was a shambles but when we got it right it was still effective…now rather than doing to difficult, but right thing, and fixing it we have just decided to play without it and just use it as a means to restart play…you think back to the way we mauled NZL in the 2nd half of the RWC QF…you couldn’t dream of seeing our maul causing that sort of damage now…we have pretty light SR’s and at times it feels like we are struggling to get them in the air, totally unacceptable.

Our line-out is not good enough for professional rugby, some of the SH!5 that happened on Saturday, especially that lineout on 55 seconds, was so bad it was verging on comedy.

We already know Crowley is a proven test player based on the 2024 6N and how he played in SA that summer.

We had 5 22 entries, same amount as NZL managed. Maybe the question needs to be rather than the 10 why are we only winning 69% of our lineouts despite having 6 test lions in our pack and then why is our ruck clear out and protection so poor…maybe instead of making excuses let’s actually fix these problems, you could bring Sexton back in at 10…it’s not going to help our test lions win their lineouts and it’s not going to help them clear out and secure ruck ball.