Ireland Team Talk XII: Farrell's First Fifteen

This being portrayed as “anguish” is more than humorous to me, given some of the things we’ve read on here over the last week…

Correct, my apologies, it wsa Fekitoa. Another NIQ. So I guess yesterday, in response to your suggestion:

How does Munster spending money on NIQ help the IRFU or Ireland?

We can point to IQ players being involved in a URC win, who said NIQ helped to deliver…

Munster can't force benefactors to accept where they want to spend the money on. And if the benefactors only wish to donate it for NIQ and big signings, Munster would have been fools not to accept it.

So in summary:

• "[centrally contracted players] rarely play for the Province" - Heroically inaccurate.
• "That [central contract budget] is totally separate to the player development budget" - Literally untrue since the 30% and now 40% has come in and is the genesis for this entire conversation.
• "How does Munster spending money on NIQ help the IRFU or Ireland" - NIQ's have always been beneficial. To every province. And often vital towards their successes.

And you don't want to row back on any of that.

I've admitted my mistake with regard Fekitoa vs De Allende.

That's the difference here.

Tries are tries, I don't really care how they come about. It's great in a squad to have different players who can score and create tries in different ways.

Lowe's value to Leinster and Ireland for me was how different a profile of winger he was to our other options. It's noticeable for me, how much more space Leinster have to attack when he's out wide, because I think defences have to respect his strength & power (we saw multiple good linebreaks last week v the Stormers from him where when he gets a defender in space one-on-one, his fend is too strong) and tend to compress on him with multiple defenders, leaving space elsewhere.

This ability to suck in multiple tacklers coupled with his excellent offloading ability is what makes him one of our better wingers at creating tries I think.

There's a pretty clear distinction between 'creating' and 'finishing'.

Clear to most people anyway.

Earls is our second highest try-scorer internationally and Munster's all-time second highest try-scorer. Was the point that TOB is more of a 'finisher' like Earls in terms of style of play… or that Lowe leaves both in the ha'penny place? ('cos I'm not sure he does in Earls' case).

Lowe definitely offered something different to other wingers. He had a rocky start defensively but that improved once he settled internationally. I'd argue at times our backline was a bit too pedestrian in recent times - we saw what adding Balacoune and TOB has done - but like Hansen, he did offer something different.

That said, I do think it's the right time to move on, though can see why people might think he could have played a part but he'd be 35 at the RWC. The fall of the cliff comes very fast for backs compared to the fatties.

I'd argue the All Blacks are more ruthless with their wingers. We should be starting to move on from some of our more senior players in my opinion - Henshaw, Furlong especially. I think JvdF is not operating at his previously high-level and we need to start seeing game-time given to others to broaden the net, similarly Ringrose who I think is a very average international centre these days. Tadhg Beirne is another that has a lot of miles on the clock, am interested to see will he maintain his high level next season, he takes so much punishment. If we're nursing a slew of these older players to the RWC I don't fancy our chances.

I kind of get why provincial coaches, relatively limited by the parameters of their squad, and occasionally under pressure to deliver results etc, move away from developing players and lean heavily towards the more trusted, older established players.

Examples of this for me are guys like John Ryan still getting picked for Munster right up until the end - if you're picking Ryan & Ala'alatoa and the scrum is still getting demolished with frequency, you can shrug your shoulders and say "these are our best props available, we clearly need signings etc", whereas if he was giving those minutes to Ronan Foxe, and the scrum was getting demolished, then the narrative might be "McMillan messed up, gambling giving minutes to a young prop who wasn't ready".

This is part of the difficult remit coaching an Irish province, where there is an expectation to produce players. Regularly - over the course of the season, you don't have the luxury of always selecting the best available players to you.

But - at the international level, there are a lot more options available and I genuinely struggle to see an argument for why Farrell & Co aren't simply selecting the best player available to them more often than not. There is less expectation at that level around development, it's more about just delivering results (something Farrell has by and large been very good at doing), so if he's still picking guys, then for the most part to me it's because he thinks they're the best available.