Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

There's a degree to which that is true. Farrell takes the overall responsibility for everything, he's the main man. That's fine.

We've had other coaches on those positions and have done very well. The change isn't Farrell, it's Goodman and O'Connell.

Not that there aren't other factors at play, but at the moment their particular remits are lacking, and I trust Farrell to fix it, but I don't trust either of them in the same sense, because I don't think they were up to it in the first place. Farrell, however, is.

It is not going to happen. Sam is the man and will be for some time.

Hard to tell with the lineout because a lot of our ball seema to come at 2? Could be wrong, just feels like we are playing it safe.

It's hard to know what the right thing to do is for Saturday. Realistically, sweeping changes to personnel aren't possible. We could bring guys like Lowe, Ryan, Conan back into the XV but that might be the extent of it. I personally would let Timoney and Casey and maybe stick Edogbo on the bench. If we have a new tactical approach (and I really hope this relentless kicking isn't it), then we need to give the players time to adapt to it, chopping and changing too much will ultimately be self-defeating.

If we're on a downward curve talent-wise, which was always likely to happen, then we need to figure out how best to use the players we do have, and what we saw on Thursday was not it.

And the utter lack of intensity needs to be fixed. Timoney and Ryan stood out on Thursday because they crashed into French lads, which should be a basic requirement for taking the field. My concern is that the players need a fresh voice in the changing room. At some point, players stop responding to the same shtick. We hit that point with Joe in 2019, if we've hit it with Farrell we're in trouble.

Yes they had and they also contested on the opposition throw something we didn't do against France

Goodman is not our attack coach. Andy is. Goodman is a set piece coach. So as much as majority of people think Goodman is stealing a living then overall attack strategy is on Andy.

I'm not against replacing Goodman, but it would only have a significant impact if Andy promoted the replacement to full attack coach.

Completely agree. It's like watching games from 2016, except even moreso… kicking and winning contestables now seems to be hugely over-rewarded since the change to the escort laws, and it's clearly at the expense of fluid attacking phase-play, which is what Ireland built their success on.

When one of our best attacks on Thursday is a bomb into the 22 that Garry Ringrose is a hand away from recovering, you know something is off.

That said, we haven't adapted to it as well as other teams have.

If we're going to persist with this, we need to be selecting our best back 3 players under the high ball. Keenan would make a huge difference here. Mack Hansen would help too (and at stepping in as first receiver). That leaves one wing option.

For me, Osborne is good, but I hate him as a wing option. Imo, Calvin Nash is amongst those next up as being a quality option for contestables.

I think it's more to do with how the breakdown is refereed now.

There seems a very clear trend in refereeing over the past 18 months or so where jackaling players are unduly rewarded, and teams run a high risk of conceding penalties when attempting to play phase-play attack.

This leads to a scenario where teams seem very reluctant to attack from deep, because the risk of conceding penalties is so high.

The real solution to this is the way the French play at their best - a high offloading game which avoids the need to commit high numbers to the breakdown, but's it's obviously not without risk in and of itself. You need to largely be winning collisions to play this type of game.

I struggle to think of any Irish sides who've ever had an awful lot of success with a heavy offloading gameplan.

Yeah, agreed.

There aren't many teams anywhere who've been hugely successful with it as a strategy tbh. Toulouse are so so good at it, but with their quality of players, they'd be successful playing almost any strategy in all likelihood.

It is not just the escort laws. It is also to do with the breakdown. The new laws with regards head contact/croc rolls etc make it harder to remove the jackaller. So the more rucks there are the more likely a turnover is. Even just slowing the ball down. It is much harder to play a high phase count game.

What France also did is a lot of offloading in the tackle to remove the ruck. If we want free flowing running rugby we need to get better at offloading and running support lines.

We also need to have better support lines in the chasing of the contestable. Not just the catcher but others to pick up on the scraps.