Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

I don’t disagree with us being miles behind SA and France, that much is obvious but that wasn’t the point I was arguing.

The point is we’ve beaten England already in that period and while we lost to NZL, you would also argue how much did us not playing any rugby going into it played a role. I would say the gap between 3-5 is a lot more debatable due to there not being as much concrete evidence. From what I’ve seen of England they aren’t as good as France or SA so it’ll be a clear indication of where we rank amongst the rest of the pack.

The clear evidence we have so far is we are well behind France & SA but we are also well ahead of Scotland & Australia etc. the question that remains is where we rank in the middle portion, we beat England but lost to NZL whereas England lost to us but beat NZL and NZL beat us but lost to England. England obviously are now on a 12 game win streak so will be a different proposition to the one we played last year but at the same time of that 12 game win streak how many “wow” games have they had? NZL probably but other than that it’s not been that impressive performance wise, even the France win while an impressive result was probably one of the flukiest wins you’ll ever see in rugby (even the most one eyed English fan would admit that). What impresses me most about England is their consistency, while not being as mind blowingly good as some of France/SA’s best games their consistency has made up for it. We’ll definitely be underdogs but I doubt it’ll be 2 score underdogs unless Ireland are dreadful this weekend and/or England are impressive. I suspect it’ll be like 7-8 points underdogs, similar to our handicap in 2020 when we went to Twickenham, which conveniently is how I see the game going unfortunately bar massive improvement.

Really rate Brex so was relieved for our sake to hear this…then I hear Capuzzo is available and my heart sank, if we are falling off tackles like we were on Tuesday and he gets the ball we are in trouble.

They are no mugs but realistically only 3 probably get into the Irish backline (Garbisi, Menoncello and Capuozzo…if he was available Brex possibly as well).

Tbh, if we play like we did in the last 30 minutes we should be okay…but that first 50 was frighteningly bad that I certainly won’t be counting my chicken. That first 50 will sting for awhile I suspect.

In that case I agree but I suspect it’s a single digit handicap, unless there are some surprise results this week that might influence the handicap.

It’s not necessarily a case of dropping TOB, it’s more about wanting to see Baloucoune get a run in the team.

I mean yes of course Wales are practically a walk over now whereas France were a tough side but one you’d be confident of beating. The big difference in Andy Farrells favour is we have yet to lose to a side that finished bottom half of the table whereas Schmidt lost to Wales & Scotland in 2017 who finished 4th and 5th and in 2016 lost to France who finished 5th. Personally , I find this worse than losing to a quality French side that we saw in Thursday, granted both suck!