Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

He’s played 27 games for Ireland with 10 of them as a starter . That’s a decent amount of starts considering he’s been behind arguably the second best scrum half in the world over the last 4 years.

To be fair, if you look at this Tier 1 minutes going back to the last RWC, it looks as follows:

You're really not giving a guy much of an opportunity to come on and influence the game when they're getting such scant minutes off the bench.

The last time he started was vs SA where he was going well JGP's absence, and was unfortunate with his injury. (And unfortunate at the timing of his injury for the 2024/25 6N).

He's spoken about really well by guys in camp, I'm hopeful we'll see a performance from him here.

Given some of the reactions I've gotten on here in the last week, I don't see any value in going into this a week after the game has passed.

But based on this, I think it's fair to say we'd have some disagreements; imo, it wasn't close to a "pretty solid display of tackling".

"The eye's dont see what the mind don't know"

A lot of that going on with the analysis of his tackling.

Also worth remembering that ankle taps and rip attempts go down as missed tackles.

We saw the same in the La Rochelle game a few weeks ago. You can question is efficacy for sure but he was right in the thick of the physical stuff.

You're not wrong unfortunately. The problem stems back to this stupid idea of central contracts which has been the bane of Irish rugby since it's inception. It has insured that coaches have very limited choice in squad selections and given us this feeling of deja vu year after year. This is not to say there has not been good years, by nature this will happen. But it limits possible change when times are not so good

That’s fair, minutes against Tier 1 teams are important but it’s hard to find when you have a better player in front of you. Comparing his numbers with Maxine Lucu who has been behind Dupont for the last few years is interesting. Lucu played 33 games for France and started 12. He’s racked up 986 minutes averaging 30mins per game. Casey by comparison has played 27 games and started 10, racking up 824 minutes for an average of 31 mins per game.

Casey hasn’t had as many minutes as hoped as he’s been behind JGP and Murray and had ill timed injuries but he’s still racked up a decent amount of game time regardless.

And if he wasn’t attempting tackles would it be because teams are avoiding his channel or he’s hiding?

Crowley made 18 tackles against Leinster in October. Was that because Leinster targeted him as a weak link? I don’t think so.

I assumed AF has already told Sam, no matter how many errors he makes - he is undroppable.