Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

professional sports with salary caps Is full of dodgy contracts, always was. And it was the owner of Saracens who chose that route.
Ogara’s discipline is fine compared to the South African head coach.

They would be others interested I am sure. Let’s not kid ourselves, Farrell and his coaching ticket and his core of main players have been very poor for 15 months. Changing them today would make no real difference.

Ireland lost to France and were missing supposedly some of their main players, they also hammered us last year so what real difference did it make to them being missing this year.
zero.

keeping certain players on central contracts , when does players are not performing that much better then does not on central contracts, will damage the game a lot more then picking foreign based players.
Irish rugby is on the verge of going back to the bad old days - I know you and others might not believe this and that’s fine.
But we are much closer to wales then France or England , and if that does not worry the IRFU then they will pay the price for that eventually

Farrell rightly has a huge amount of goodwill stored up. He won't be going anywhere based on this 6N.

In the last 10 years in the All Ireland football we have had winners from Ulster, Leinster and Munster. During that time both mayo and Galways got to the final

Go back over the last 20 years and its a similar story

Ireland has talent young players all over and has nothing to do with Private schools. Its the job of the provinces to identify that talent and attract them to rugby. The chance of a professional contracts with all the bells and whistles that go with that should be getting more players from GAA which is not professional.

A person in any county in ireland can reach the top of the rugby World professional game while living at home or close to home in all of the provinces. Which other sport in Ireland can offer the same?

But IMO the easy option is to make excuses and wait for players to come from leinster. Devine in Connacht is an example of a very talented rugby player from Connacht who has had to leave and go to another province because they went and signed a Leinster player to replace him. That is not a system working for the young player from Connacht is it?

Yes the production has increased in the provinces but the new IRFU model of moving more and more players out of leinster is going to help them how? how many are going to have to leave their home province or leave rugby altogether because the spot they are fighting all of their life to get to is filled by a young player from Leinster

For Ireland to grow as a rugby nation, all of the four provinces need to have a production pipeline and not spend the entire time talking about the Leinster system which has absolutely nothing to do with them

Goodman has serious questions to answer, more than a defence coach.

Why would they not be doing skills training?

It’s one poster to be fair.

I was certainly in the camp of wanting more experimentation, but I’m definitely not calling for Farrell’s head, and don’t expect any change this side of the RWC.