Leinster Team Talk Thread (Love you Furlong time)

You don’t need to keep a clean sheet to win a game you’re 17 points up in at home

URC presale.

Family of four. Seats in Davin Stand. €102 plus fees for 2A 2J tickets.

I paid €46 last weekend in the Aviva.

I'm saying Blackrock isn't the only private school in the country with a better than average pupil to teacher ratio, it also isn't the most expensive school etc, so why don't some of these other schools have a better track record in producing pro rugby prospects?

The poaching players thing is massively, chronically overstated. A very small handful of players over the past 15 years or so; when the vast overwhelming majority of pro players produced were guys who were there from Day 1 or attended Willow. This is also not a phenomenon unique to Blackrock - CBC Cork have had guys join midstream, Roscrea, Newbridge, Michael's Clongowes etc. It happens everywhere, and it's regularly for reasons outside of rugby too.

I keep asking the same question, and so far you are providing absolutely no answer to it - just rhetorical statements like "if you can't see the huge advantages the likes of a Blackrock etc…" -

Here's the stuff you listed:

• The size of the school - Blackrock has c. 1,100 students. Obviously a big school, but virtually the same size as Belvedere, Terenure, and even CBC in Cork which has around 920 students.
• The dedicated coaching team - as I've already shown, they're almost exclusively teachers in the school. Do no other schools have dedicated coaching teams with good quality coaches? What about Phil Werahiko (Director of Rugby in Belvedere), Declan Fassbender (Gonzaga), Jonny Holland (CBC Cork), Andy Skehan (Michaels), Ger Slattery (St Munchins) etc?
• Massive amount of funds - What in this makes Blackrock an outlier? Why don't more expensive schools produce even more rugby players? Are you claiming schools like CBC (€4,500 pa day fees), PBC (€6,000 pa day fees), Glenstal Abbey (€14,500 annual fees), Rockwell College (€7,125 day fees) are all impoverished or something?
• Superlative Facilities - the facilities are very good, granted, but honestly, they are not unusual amongst the 20-30 serious rugby schools in the country. Any of the schools I've listed in this comment so far all have exceptional facilities, and yet none seem to produce players to anywhere near the same extent.
• Poaching Players - Massively overstated and overblown, doesn't really happen to any great extent. There is a higher level of players who transfer there midstream to help their chances to progress, but they aren't being approached and certainly aren't being poached. If I was to go through the last 50+ pro rugby players to be produced by Blackrock, I'd wager over 90% were in the school for their full cycle.

Once again - and centrally - none of the above is specific to Blackrock, but Blackrock's production of pro calibre rugby players vastly outstrips any other school in the country.

He was sent to Blackrock because his Dad went to Blackrock.

He's also a relatively small example of this.

Of the c. 28 players who came through Blackrock currently attached to one of the 4 provinces, 20 of them are from either Dublin or north Wicklow. Of the 8 who boarded - Oli Jager's Dad was a teacher in the school, Caelan Doris & Niall Smyth's fathers attended the school, Denis Buckley & Dave Heffernan went home to Connacht post graduating and Albert Lindner is from Germany. Jeremy Loughman and Joey Carbery joined for senior cycle.

He was playing rugby with Ballina before he went to Blackrock.

And I would completely agree with all of that. I think that tradition does give it an edge over other schools though. Even over the likes of Belvo etc, maybe not so much St Michaels as they have really pushed through an unreal amount of players to Leinster over the last decade or so. That religion/tradition isn't there.

As for CBC Cork etc, Munster rugby are just shambolic but I would argue that the likes of PBC and CBC should be pushing players into the Munster set-up a lot more than they are but is the approach diluted by GAA there?

Not in recent years.

There are 21 St Michaels' alumni contracted this season (between senior squads and academies) versus 28 from Rock, but of that - some are retiring this season (Oisin Dowling), some leaving Irish rugby (Luke McGrath), some likely to be cut from academies (Sam Berman, Will de Klerk, James Nicholson, Henry McErlean).

Their production has arguably fallen back a little in recent years.