Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

Ah you know yourself. All the prominent media from D4. Quinlan, Zebo, Cian Treacy, Murray Kinsella. All from Ballsbridge.

but it’s been 3 years and it just hasn’t, which means it probably never will.

It might improve, whether it improves enough is very uncertain though.

But OHs develop at different rates. He's still a year younger than Sexton was when he made his Ireland debut. He's younger than Crowley was at the last RWC. Harry Byrne is 27 and only now starting to look like a rounded OH. JJ Hanrahan was nominated for the u20 world player of the year and spent the rest of his career failing to live up to it.

TLDR; he might become good enough, he might not. If not, he won't get many more Ireland caps.

Combo of rewriting history and damning with faint praise here. Harry is having his most consistent run by a mile this season.

As for competing with Ross and Frawley - latter has barely played 10 for Leinster and former is extremely limited. He would have easily pushed past both if he was consistently performing like he has been this season.

Can't say I remember any issues at all watching that years under 20's other than he played really well but thats hindsight and subject to error. Imo that was the start of the Hype around him. My main point though is that he has talent and it would be best for Irish rugby if we polished up the issues and that talent became of use to us at the highest level he can play, whatever that may be.

If he ends up as a decent 2nd or 3rd choice at one of the provinces or as the next Dan Carter that's fine by me, but I would like to see the heat that currently exists in the ongoing debates around him stop so that he can be judged on a body of work and not just on the mistakes. Let the lad land where he lands. I agree that he was mishandled by Farrell and his team and exposed when he shouldn't have been but that ship has sailed, its what happens next that will decide if he is an asset to Irish rugby or a footnote.

If Connacht had signed him instead of Frawley I would be thrilled to see what Lancaster and co could do with him next season.

The other thing to say about Harry is he was good for 1-2 catastrophic howlers per game up until very recently. Where he'd try things that were just never on, real issue with decision making. Looking at the Toulon game where he made a number of mistakes especially when kicking the ball, they were execution rather than decision making errors. He has massively improved in that regard imo.

I don't see social media abuse of Prendergast. Not saying it doesn't happen but I don't use twitter and Instagram. What kind of abuse is he getting?

Is it similar to the kind of criticism you see on Boards like people saying he's a poor tackler, or is it mad stuff like death threats or what?

It might also have been regular gametime.

I thought he played 11 out of the 15 games Bristol had from January. How, in the name of jaysus, is that not a good run of games?

This is fair, fitz (and I have posts on here saying Prendergast will feel hard done by with the forwards etc. vs the performances that happened when Crowley was in).

But I also feel I could say the same in reverse. i.e. some of the same posters who were criticising Crowley for not putting shape on the attack in the NZ game, not taking control of the game, game management etc. were then saying in games where Leinster played poorly with Sam that it was down to poor decoy lines, zero invention or deception on running lines and it was a coaching issue.

Additionally, I think we could reasonably have expected Prendergast to play better if, for example, the packs performance was better vs France. But I also think that there were things Prendergast was doing really poorly that were completely independent of players around him.

I entirely agree it's frustrating as hell fwiw.